The last week of the festival went by as usual for the rest of the town. Though Elach couldn’t really remember a time when he didn’t spend nearly every waking moment of a festival in the gardens. It was like reliving an old memory. And it would have been even more magical if he didn’t now spend every waking moment either tending the stall or making more sweets to sell. Since the spring had been closed to everyone, families and groups that would have normally left right after their hopefuls were bonded now milled about, increasing the demand for every single service and product the town had for this last week. And so it passed by in an uneventful blur, but at least this blur was slightly different than all the others he’d lived through.

“Have you heard back from any of our old friends yet?” Elach asked, already knowing the answer, but hope required him to ask.

“Nothing new since yesterday.” Kayvee said absentmindedly, digging though his bag with a frown on his face. “Do you have the paperwork for the rooms?”

“In my bag with the rest of my things.” Elach patted the side pocket of his backpack for emphasis. “Everything packed on your end?”

“You know it is. Only one day left until we leave this place.” Kayvee hefted his bag over his shoulder, closing the gate to his parent’s property and locking it with a silver key. “Your parents still willing to give us an Issi rundown?”

“Just the basic basics, but yeah. Mom and dad were setting something up in the backyard when I came to check on you.” Elach said as he fell in stride with Kayvee. “Your parents still ignoring you?”

“Yup. Didn’t even care that I took a lot of coin from the vault.” Kayvee sighed, adjusting his pack on his shoulder. “Probably won’t even write if I end up staying in Resthollow.”

“Not a bad problem to have.” Elach said.

“Not a bad one at all.” Kayvee agreed.

-------------------------------------------------

“Good, you’re here. Your auto-carriage leaves at eight, so that gives us plenty of time for this.” Preht said as she saw Elach open the gate to the backyard, where a series of bowls were set out on a wooden table. Elach got a slightly different sensation when he looked at each of them, ranging from a shiver up his spine to a feeling like intense sunlight on his face. “Take a seat; dad is just putting the finishing touches on our little demonstration. He’ll be out in a second.”

Elach took a seat opposite of Kayvee, but Preht herded him to sit on the same side as Kayvee. Something about seeing better from there. “Don’t touch the bowls yet. It’ll spoil the surprise.” She ordered with a smile, running back into the house to help Jven with whatever he was doing.

His parents emerged a few minutes later carrying one of the big melting pots between them that sloshed as they set it down on the grass near the table. Jven produced two small cups and filled them with whatever was in the bowl, handing them to Elach and Kayvee. “Drink these. It’ll help you understand everything we’re about to show you. Don’t worry, mom put a boatload of sugar in there to mask the flavour.”

“Good to know it would have tasted disgusting.” Elach said, a preliminary sniff of the cup having revealed only sweetness. “What’s this going to do to us?”

“Just drink it.” Kayvee said, wiping off his mouth. He’d already drained his cup. “We’ll find out what it does in a minute anyways.”

“Fine. Guess I’ll trust that my own parents aren’t poisoning me.” Elach said, bringing his cup to his lips and drinking it down in one big gulp.

“We would have done it a long time ago if we wanted to.” Preht said with a smirk. “Pass me your cups, please.”

Elach tried to give Preht his cup, but his arms were no longer obeying him. And neither were his legs, or his neck, or anything but his eyes and mouth really. “I knew it was poison.” He laughed. “Seriously though; what did you do to us?”

“Are you alright man?” Kayvee asked as he handed his own cup to Preht, who raised an eyebrow at Elach. “You can’t move right now, can you?” he said with a wolfish grin, taking Elach’s cup and carefully balancing it on his head.

“Your container really is underdeveloped. But don’t worry, a few months of hard work and the two of you won’t even notice a difference between your containers.” Preht said, swiping Elach’s cup from his head. “This is just a simple concoction that’ll mimic the effects of actually having a bond while it’s in your system, but it only lasts an hour or so. Plenty of time for us to say everything we need to.”

Jven tapped on the side of the mixing bowl, red lines shooting through the bowl as the Issi worked into the metal started to heat it up. As the drink started heating up, Elach felt his own stomach growing warmer and warmer until it felt like he’d swallowed a bowl of campfire embers.

“Now that the drink’s activated, take a look at the bowls.” Preht instructed, and Elach tried to nod before remembering he was temporarily paralyzed. “You should see a distinct aura from each of them; get your best guess ready but don’t say anything.”

Elach did see the seeds of something coming from each of the bowls, rising up through the lids like they weren’t even there. The bowl that Preht had singled out was producing a tiny plume of pink and white smoke with little glass embers popping through the lid, and Elach didn’t have a clue what that meant.

“Alright, that’s enough time. You first, Elach.”

“It looks like pink and white smoke with glass embers.” Elach relayed, and the noise Kayvee made from next to him made him question his own perception.

Preht made a clicking noise with her tongue. “Interesting. How about you, Kayvee?”

“I saw a pink and white liquid boiling with glass bubbles forming and popping.” Kayvee said. “So the same colours and things as Elach, but in a completely different form. Is that normal?”

“There is no normal when it comes to Issi. your perception of the concept or form it embodies will influence how it appears to you in its natural state. Issi from practitioners or beasts will always bend to their will, but natural Issi isn’t like that.” Preht explained. “I myself see a glass effigy burning pink and white when I look at that bowl.”

“And I see a piece of forged glass glowing pink and white with the heat.” Jven added. “Now, with those four examples, what kind of Issi do you think this is?”

“Pyretic Issi.” Elach said without hesitation, and Preht nodded in acceptance.

“Correct. The common point between all of our manifestations was heat. Now, I want you to focus on the other bowls.” Preht instructed.

Elach did so, and instantly noticed that all of the bowls were producing the exact same phenomena, but with the colours and sparks changing.

“It’s because of what we drank, isn’t it?” Kayvee asked after a moment of deliberation. “It’s turning everything into pyretic Issi.”

Preht put her fingers together so that they were almost touching. “Almost correct. Put your hand over the bowl with bright yellow and blue Issi and tell me what it feels like.”

Kayvee did and instantly yanked his hand back, yelping in surprise at the snap of static electricity that arced between his hand and the bowl.

“As you can see, the Issi still has all its properties even when it takes the form of something else. Now, you’re probably wondering how this applies to the real world.” Preht put one hand over her stomach and pointed to the base of her skull with the other. “Your container acts like this drink; it takes the physical form of whatever Issi you get from a bond and manipulates it to fit it’s own type. No other properties are changed, though, so that’s how you get electricity Issi practitioners who can make blades out of lightning or water artists that can disappear into inky darkness.”

“To make it simple: your bonds denote what you can do and your container denotes how you do it.” Jven added, and Preht nodded in thanks. “So now you know what pyretic Issi looks like to you, and that’s the form your Issi would take if either of you bonded with a pyretic wisp. But we didn’t have anything that could produce an abyssal or mortal Issi reaction like our bowl here could, so we went with this instead. Gets the point across pretty much the same anyways.”

“Now try and identify what supertype of Issi is in each of the bowls. You can bounce ideas off each other for this part.” Preht said, then added: “You still can’t touch the bowls or the Issi manifesting off of them, though; it’d make this too easy.”

Elach turned his gaze, but not his neck, to the six bowls on the table. The pink and white flame was still burning strong, and the others were similar in shape but not in colour or texture. The far left bowl was like black ink with swirls of dark blue masquerading as fire, and the one next to that was like sparks from a grindstone and coal dust were mingling. The other three were: electricity dancing to an unheard beat, a mass of flower petals and blood, and a normal fire.

“The last one’s obviously pyretic Issi.” Elach said, and Kayvee made a confirmatory noise. “I think the far left bowl is abyssal, and the one next to pyretic is mortal, but I’m not sure about the other three.”

“Pretty sure the one with electricity in it is fulminous Issi.” Kayvee said. “And I know that one,” Kayvee pointed to the spark and dust bowl, “Is earthen Issi. Not sure about the pink and white one, though. What do we have left, anyways?”

“Seraphic, spatial, deprivation, martial, and transformative.” Elach listed off. “I don’t think it’s deprivation, though, so we can cross that one off. And I’m pretty sure spatial Issi would be more… unstable?”

“So that leaves us with seraphic, martial, and transformative. If we were right about the other five. So maybe we should think about what your parents had on hand instead.” Kayvee said.

“I know they wouldn’t be able to get any transformative Issi, so that leaves martial and seraphic which are both pretty easy to get a hold of. I’m personally thinking it’s seraphic just because I’m not sure what pink and white with glass has to do with weapons or enhancement.” Elach theorized.

“Seems like a good guess to me. How many did we get right?” Kayvee asked; the question having been aimed at Preht and Jven.

“Six out of six.” Preht said with a nod. “Deprivation, and transformative Issi aren’t really useful in everyday scenarios so we didn’t have any on hand to show you. We also ran out of spatial and martial Issi while we prepared for the festival. And, unfortunately, this is the extent of what we can teach you about Issi in general.”

Kayvee raised an eyebrow. “You can’t teach us how to use Issi at all?”

Jven nodded with a small smile on his face. “The way a practitioner uses Issi is completely unique to them; from absorbing it to purifying it to shaping it into techniques. And making a focus is based on a combination of your Issi and the item you’re trying to use, so that’s even less useful to you right now.”

“What we can do is brace you for the changes that will come to your body once you’ve bonded with Resthollow. You’ve probably noticed by now, but all the practitioners that come by have some major differences beyond height, weight, eye and hair colour.” Preht emphasized her point by gesturing at herself and Jven. “When you become an Issi practitioner, the Issi you take inside your container starts to change you. And not just on the inside, on the outside too.”

Elach took a good long look at his parents, and he couldn’t notice anything off about them. Nothing that he, their son, had ever seen them without, at least. Jven was still a mountain of a man with molten silver veins running under his skin and fingertips that looked like they were just pulled out of a blast furnace, and Preht had her red hair with roots like blackened embers, ashes falling from her skin that disappeared before they could touch the floor. They were just his parents.

“I guess I never noticed, somehow.” Kayvee said thoughtfully. “The kids we worked with were all pretty much the same, but the adults all had something unique about them. I always chalked it up to puberty, but Elach and I are a little too old to be waiting on that, aren’t we?”

“I didn’t even think about it.” Elach admitted. “But now I honestly feel a little dumb for not noticing.”

“We don’t have many practitioners staying here after they bond, so you wouldn’t have seen any transformations.” Jven said, rubbing his chin in thought. “I actually can’t remember who the last person who stayed here was. Was it Jik and Eyll’s kid?”

“He died, dear.” Preht said.

“Ah, right. Some kind of disease, if I remember correctly?”

“Yes, the disease of having too much blood on the outside of his body.” Preht rolled her eyes. “He was killed during his bonding trial. Went after some Issi beast that was too violent and feral for him.”

“Then who was the last kid who stayed after bonding?”

“There hasn’t been one in the twenty four years we’ve lived here.”

“Really? Huh. Guess I never noticed either.” Jven shrugged. “Just goes to show that a practitioner can’t resist the call of Issi.”

“You two can go finish packing.” Preht said, tapping Elach on the forehead. He felt the Issi drain out of him, gasping as control of his body was returned to him.

“We’re already done.” Kayvee said, motioning at his bag.

“Then you should go enjoy your last day here in the village.” Preht said. “The garden’s still quarantined, but there must be something you can do.”

“We’ll find something.” Elach said, pulling his bag over his shoulder.

They didn’t find anything, and Elach’s last hours of his last day were spent playing a few of the dozens of card games he and Kayvee had learned or made up over the years along with a walk through the forest and a swim in the more popular local watering hole that wasn’t in the wisp gardens. Then night came, and Elach said an emotional yet excited goodbye to his parents that was accompanied by quite a few hugs before stepping aside for his parents to say goodbye to Kayvee. When all was said and done, and Elach’s parents had saddled him with enough sweets to last him and Kayvee a month or more, Elach climbed into the carriage and held open the door for Kayvee who sat opposite him.

There was a console in the middle with a map of the carriage’s operating radius, with their village on one end and Resthollow just barely in the bottom left corner. Elach moved what looked like a pawn from chess that was made of iron with a glowing blue base from their village to Resthollow, deposited quite a few coins into the base of the carriage, and settled into the plush seats for a very long ride.

The first night of travel was completely uneventful; people avoided the automated carriage routes like the plague because of the danger a speeding lump of Issi infused metal provided to pedestrians. So Elach got three solid two hour naps in over the night, taking a drink of water from one of his oversized canteens and a snack of dried fruit whenever he woke. And when dawn finally broke through the front window Kayvee groggily pushed down on the pawn for five seconds, the carriage slowing down more and more until it came to a halt. If they’d splurged on a more expensive carriage this stop wouldn’t have been necessary, since the luxury models came with running water and in-carriage plumbing.

After a bathroom break and tooth brushing Elach and Kayvee ate a breakfast of fresh fruit and milk Jven had packed for them. Lunch was potato wraps with egg, meat, and cheese, and the supper of fish and sauteed vegetables would be the last they’d taste of home for a long time. Elach tossed out the pits and peels of the fruit and rinsed out the two canteens of milk before returning to the carriage, and Kayvee pressed down on the pawn until the carriage accelerated to it’s top speed before taking a well read book out of his bag and leaning back while flipping to a dog-eared page. Elach followed suit with his own book, and the second leg of their journey passed in a silence broken only to eat.

The carriage rumbled to a stop in the middle of the night, and Elach slept completely through it. He was woken when an older man with steel grey hair and eyes opened the carriage with cleaning supplies in hand, startling awake to the sudden intrusion of sounds that the noise-proofing on the carriage had previously kept out. Elach roused Kayvee from his slumber and apologized to the man for overstaying their welcome, but the man just chuckled.

“Happens far more often than it doesn’t when they come in this late.” He said with a smile, ducking into the carriage and closing the door behind him.

For the second time, Elach got a good look at somewhere other than his village. And what he saw shattered his tiny world.

The walls of Resthollow were a complex latticework of solid steel with bone-white filigree, like the armor Resthollow’s manifestation had worn a week ago. Figures milled about on top of the walls in less impressive versions of that same armor, and Elach reasoned that they must be Resthollow’s vassals. Did everyone that lived here have a bond with Resthollow? It seemed impossible considering how the walls stretched off into the horizon, and then he looked higher. Towers of steel loomed above everything else, three huge buildings surrounded by grasping tendrils of bone that spiraled upwards, each emblazoned with a crest that must have been Resthollow’s. It looked like a castle rampart enclosed by a ribcage, all bone white and polished to gleam like the moonlight above.

“Eternals, that’s impressive.” Kayvee whistled, putting insufficient words to Elach’s thoughts. “And that’s just what we can see from outside the walls. I can’t imagine what the city itself looks like.”

“I just hope they let us in.” Elach said, eyeing the small line of lavishly dressed people forming outside of a huge silver and black gate. “Those people look more powerful, more important, and way richer than us.”

“Guess we just have to get in line and see.” Kayvee replied.

“So we do.” Elach agreed, taking his place at the back of the line.

The people in line completely ignored them after an initial glance, but it seemed that was the default amount of attention they spared to everyone else in the line as they went back to standing still and pretending that nobody else existed. Even with the small line it still took half an hour for them to get to the gates, where a guard in steel and white plate mail minus the helmet gave them a sideways look as they approached.

“Names and occupations, please.”

“Elach and Kayvee, no occupations.” Elach said, and the guard’s patience visibly thinned. That was not good.

“Full names.” He said, all politeness already having left.

“We don’t have full names yet.” Kayvee said. “We’re here for Resthollow’s trial.”

The guard sighed and motioned to a caravan of goods that Elach had somehow ignored for the last half hour, then threw a thumb over his shoulder. “This is the merchant’s entrance. Visitor’s entrance is that way.”

“Whoops.” Elach said sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head. “Sorry for wasting your time.”

“Just stand on the plate and answer the questions I ask you. You’re already here, so might as well not waste both our time.” The guard said, motioning to a steel plate in the ground that the merchants ahead of them had all stood on. Elach looked at Kayvee who shrugged, so he stepped onto the plate first.

“First question: do you intend to bring harm to Resthollow, the city or the manifestation, in any way, shape, or form?”

“No.” Elach answered, and he felt a chill down his legs like the plate was sucking heat out of his body.

“Second question: what is the purpose of your visit?”

“To bond with Resthollow.”

The guard nodded at that, looking down at a black slate he held before continuing. “Third question: who, or what, are you currently bonded to?”

“Does my wisp count?” Elach asked, and a burst of warmth shot into his feet and up his legs. It somehow reminded him of laughter.

“It does not.” The guard said, now sporting a small smirk.

“Then I have no bonds.”

“Alright. One more question and then it’s your friend’s turn.” The guard said, putting his slate down on a table and walking over to Elach. He put a hand on his shoulder, standing a hair shorter than Elach, and locked grey eyes with him. “Do you have allegiances to any powers other than Resthollow?”

“Not that I know of.” Elach said.

When nothing happened, the guard removed his hand and motioned for Elach to step away. “You’re clear for entry.” he then motioned for Kayvee to come forward. “Your turn.”

Kayvee answered the same questions Elach had, with mostly the same answers too. Until he got to the last question.

“My parents are high ranking vassals of Hoalt.” Kayvee said, and Elach watched as the hand on Kayvee’s shoulder gripped tighter.

“Is Hoalt sponsoring you through your parents?” The guard demanded, and Kayvee visibly shivered.

“I am not sponsored by anyone.” Kayvee said through chattering teeth. “Not by Hoalt, not by my parents, and not by anyone in between. The most they’ve done for me is being too rich to think that their own son might break into their vaults and liberate some travel funds.”

After a moment of silence that stretched on with held breaths, the guard released Kayvee from his grasp with a sigh. “Seems like you’re telling the truth. Or you’re powerful enough to hide any kind of Issi readings from me and Resthollow themselves, which would make this pointless anyways. So welcome to Resthollow, and here are a few pieces of advice for first-timers such as yourselves. Don’t walk in any of the lanes that aren’t marked with the silhouette of a person or have a pattern of steel Xs on them. The other lanes are for Issi travel and vehicles, and you don’t want to get caught between either of them and their destinations.”

The guard reached inside his breastplate, pulling out a small medallion that had the same crest as the towers in the city. “This symbol designates a person or place as part of Resthollow’s guild. If you need help for any reason, look for somewhere marked with this and they’ll help you out free of charge. Don’t litter, don’t cause a ruckus, and enjoy your stay.”

Elach nodded but didn’t start walking towards the smaller gate that had swung open within the huge gates. “Could you point us towards where the bonding trial happens?”

The guard pointed a finger skyward, and Elach didn’t have to turn to know where he was pointing. “Tower one’s for the trials; it’s the one with a huge number one above the entrance.”

“What are two and three for?” Kayvee asked, following the guard’s finger to look at the tower.

“Two is living space for all Resthollow’s vassals, and three is for education, training, and logistics. All the other buildings are privately owned, but the ones with Resthollow’s crest are subsidized by Resthollow for the betterment of the city.” The guard waved Elach and Kayvee on as he spoke, turning away from them before he started addressing the next merchant in line.

“Should we go check out tower one?” Elach asked, but Kayvee didn’t give an answer. He was simply overwhelmed at the sprawl of steel and flesh that spread out in front of them, and Elach felt his question slip out of his mind as Resthollow took its place.

A main road of some kind of textured black material ran down the majority of the city, stopping only when it came in contact with tower number three. The roads were cordoned off into five different sections with three decorations: the lanes sandwiching the other three decorated with steel Xs that designated them as the pedestrian portion, the lanes one step further inward were marked in steel with Resthollow’s symbol, and the centermost lane had steel wheels and a whole lot of merchants trudging down the path with their carts and carriages. There were crossroads every so often where pedestrians could go under the practitioner and vehicle lanes to emerge on the other side of the road’s pedestrian lane, large tunnels with maws of steel that swallowed people and spat them back out within moments completely unperturbed by the rapid movement.

The streets branched out every block or so, sometimes taking up two or more blocks for larger buildings, stretching out in a grid pattern that made little sense for a city that supposedly started off as a mining town. It gave off a sense of utter efficiency, neon signs advertising food, drink, pleasures, and everything in between the only non-steel, non-black, and non-white splotches of colour in the otherwise uniform city. Uniform only in colour, though not in design; Resthollow’s buildings varied massively in their construction. Aside from the massive towers that dominated the sky, Elach could see an inn designed to look like it had been carved out of a massive steel and bone tree, a bookstore and games shop that looked like an old mansion, and a bar. A normal bar. In fact, most of the buildings looked normal, making the rare standouts like the inn and bookstore all the more impressive. Of course everything was still made of metal and immaculately clean, giving the entire city an ethereal feel like he’d stepped into some storybook tale and was about to be made into a moral.

As they walked silently down the road, Elach saw quite a few different sights down the side streets. One held a giant grassy park with trees and a river running through it that must have been almost as large as his entire village, another blasting heat out into the main street with the sounds of hammers on anvils and grindstones echoing out, and yet another shrouded in shadows that called in an unfamiliar tongue in revealing dresses and too-tight trousers to try and get the attention of other more normally dressed shadows. Even Resthollow had a red-light district, apparently. And then they crossed one more intersection, and everything was amplified. The buildings didn’t weren’t just clean; they shimmered in the moonlight just like the towers had, and the spires of bone that wrapped around them chittered and shook like living creatures. People in armor like the guard’s, and a scant few like Resthollow’s, were the main occupants of this district. They were still quite a bit away from any of the towers, though, so Elach wondered if this was an isolated outpost or if it was like this all the way to the tower.

“How close are we to the inn?” Elach asked, the armored and armed guards shaking him out of his stupor. “Are we even going the right way?”

“Let me check.” Kayvee said as he walked to the edge of the road, reaching into his pack and pulling out a small box. He opened the lid to reveal a guidestone that pointed to the left and a little bit upwards. “We’re almost north enough, but I have no clue how far west we need to go.”

“Then we might as well keep walking.” Elach said as Kayvee pocketed the box and adjusted his backpack.

It took them another hour and a half to get to their inn, a standard four-story building that had minimal bone accents. They had to wake up a grey-haired man to get their room keys for the third floor, who smiled at them over dark circles as he delivered a well practiced spiel.

“First floor’s a lounge for anyone who rents a room with us, and as long as you don’t damage or dirty it up, that includes you. Breakfast’s served in the great hall from six to ten, and if you don’t come early you don’t get to complain that you don’t get your favorites. Check out is at noon, so have your rooms empty before then.” He handed Elach and Kayvee small steel keys with the numbers 308 and 310 on them. “Enjoy your stay.”

Completely ignoring everything in the Inn to beeline their way towards their rooms, Elach and Kayvee said a quick goodnight before parting ways. It was dark enough that Elach could barely see his hand in front of his face, and he flung off his clothes before pulling what he thought were the covers of his bed off and sliding between them for a few hours of sleep.