“Mmhm.” Rainshear confirmed with far less anger than Elach had expected. “You can’t hunt or kidnap wisps or practitioners inside the glacier, but anything that happens outside is fair game.”

“One of my friends might be a prize for this tournament.” Elach said. “Where do they keep all the prizes?”

“You know more wisp manifestations?” Rainshear asked, eyeing Elach suspiciously. “You know that they’re extremely rare, right?”

“And they barely need any power to be immune to the eternals’ influence.” Metea/Irric added. “Not like Rainshear or Oasis, who needed to be both powerful and isolated from the people on the other side.”

“I need to check.” Elach said. “Let me go.”

“The prize hall is open to everyone.” Metea/Irric said. “You can go there after breakfast and see if they have your friend.”

“Why aren’t you bothered by this?” Elach asked in confusion. “You said you were the guardians of wisps and things for this glacier. Why don’t you care that one of them might be locked away to be broken down and used to bond some powerful asshole’s brat?”

“Because the competition doesn’t start for another few days. And then it lasts for a week after that, with the finals happening on the solstice. Nothing gets awarded until the day after the finals, when the patrons try to buy the best competitors with promises of power and incentives from the prize hall.” Rainshear explained. “And the competitors also have the chance to ask the patrons to bond with them, but most competitors go with the patron that offers them the most power and the best incentives.”

“So we have a week and a few days.” Elach said. “And I’m guessing this is also when you need to protect people the most, right?”

“And the week after, while the closing ceremonies and other entertainment is going on.” Rainshear sighed. Elach’s chains dissolved into mist around him, and he flexed his muscles as if checking to make sure they were actually gone. His wrists and ankles felt weird, but he couldn’t see anything wrong with them so he shrugged the feeling off.

Rainshear then undid Flow’s chains, who flapped their wings once and shook their body but didn’t stop gorging themselves on the spread Rainshear had laid out.

“Once we finish eating we’ll go check out the prize hall.” Rainshear said, gesturing for Elach to help himself to the spread. “If your friend is there, I’ll find whoever put them up as a prize and we can go have a little heart-to-heart with them. Just in case things go south, can you carry your weight in a fight?”

“Nope.” Elach said shamelessly, filling his plate with some of everything from Rainshear’s spread. “I’m pretty sure my base Issi changed drastically last night, and my focus isn’t fully formed yet.”

And he still hadn’t checked the changes in his headspace. But Rainshear didn’t need to know everything.

“I’ll protect him if it comes to that.” Metea/Irric offered. “But there’s a good chance you’re wrong about this, Elach. If someone had brought in a wisp manifestation, there would be public outcry from the powerful wisp manifestations and all the seedier bastards would be salivating at the thought that their apprentices might be able to win them a powerful wisp that would come from breaking down a manifestation.”

“She speaks the truth.” Rainshear confirmed. “People would be breaking down doors and windows to get at whoever found a wisp manifestation. For their own reasons, of course.”

“I hope you’re right.” Elach said, biting down into a fritter seasoned with cinnamon and some kind of fruit that had the sweetness of raw sugar. It was a little too sweet for him, but he didn’t want to offend the people who had had him in chains up until a few seconds ago. “Because I’m not abandoning Hollow or Gilt.”

What Rainshear called the prize hall was more like the hoards Issi Tyrants kept that Elach had read about in his books. Or maybe the huge vault that his brother had told him lay under the Gilded Night, holding all the valuables Hoalt held to give the Gilded Night’s currency value. Elach had expected to at least have to check in with a guard or something, but there appeared to be no security whatsoever. Just long rows of glass cages and display cases with angular runes frosted onto them with barely enough room for three people to walk side-by-side down the aisles.

“Shouldn’t there be, I don’t know, some kind of security for a place like this?” Elach asked, motioning at the obscene wealth that surrounded them.

“Glasrime’s held accountable for everything in this hall.” Rainshear said, her attention briefly drawn by a scaled sapling in a glass case full of holes. “They enchanted each and every case and cage with Issi runes so powerful that I’m not sure you could break them. And if you somehow managed to, Glasrime would be on you within minutes.”

Elach looked up through a series of see-through glass scaffoldings to the ceiling sixty feet above. “How can there be this much stuff? There can’t be this many patrons looking for apprentices. Right?”

“When you see how rich some of the patrons are, you’ll understand.” Rainshear said. “A good three quarters of this place is probably filled by less than ten people.”

“Damn.” Elach whistled.

“Gawk all you want, because we’re going to be here for a long time.” Metea/Irric said. “It’ll take all morning, and probably all afternoon to scour every inch of this place. Could you tell us what your friend looks like so we have something to look for?”

“Gilt looks like a bunch of indecipherable text wrapped in golden ribbons, and Hollow looks like an obsidian skeleton in a dress with the empty spaces filled with grey… stuff.” Elach said, thinking back to the short time he spent with the manifestations.

“Alright. I’ll take the right, Metea/Irric takes the middle, and you get the left, Elach.” Rainshear said, motioning at the multi-leveled sea of glass and treasures spreading out in front of them. “And if you see anything that catches your eye, mark that down for later. If this goes belly-up, might as well take everything interesting that isn’t bolted down.”

“I thought you said it was impossible to break these things.” Elach said, knocking on the side of a glass display case that held a quarter of a ripped page scribbled over in red, black, and purple.

“Who said anything about breaking them?” Rainshear said with a twinkle in her eye. “Meet back here around noon for lunch. You’ll be able to hear the bells anywhere in this mess, so when they chime, start making your way back.”

Parting ways with a wave, Elach scoured the offerings of the prize hall with a focus that if he was able to see himself from the outside would have terrified him. A hungry fire burned in him that he wasn’t quite sure belonged to him alone, as Flow quickly flitted between the cases and cages on the third and highest level above him. He felt their anger at the prospect of Hollow and Gilt being captured and sold like livestock, and Elach had to wonder if they’d been friends back when they were wisps. If that was even possible.

He saw a few things that tried their hardest to distract Elach from his search for more than a few fleeting moments, but he wouldn’t let himself take in anything until he had scoured his portion of the prize hall for anything alive and wisp-related. He side-eyed a bush that looked like it made the same skewer-fruits that Sentence’s tree had, but it’s fruits were the size of tiny berries, had wrinkles and spots, and only two fruits to the skewer that made them look like a lower quality knock-off.

“You have a discerning eye, sir.” A voice called out from the shadows, and Elach cursed not-so silently but quiet enough for his words to be covered up by the clopping footsteps approaching him. “The fruits of this impaleberry ash are the finest to be seen in centuries. Look at how few discolorations mar the surface of the nearly perfect spheres. And, if the word of the gardener who discovered this tree is to be trusted, there is a chance it may sprout a thrice-impaled blue berry if properly cared for.”

“Oh, really?” Elach said with as little interest as he could put into his voice, bordering on flat out sarcasm. This tree’s orange leaves barely moved, and only folded in half when they did. Nothing like the complex shapes Sentence’s tree folded itself into.

“Yes, and my patron is so generously offering one branch from this tree to anyone who they extend an invitation to or anyone who manages to break the top thirty two in the rankings.” The woman who stepped out of the shadows said with a smile, her arms open wide as if to invite Elach to join her in the generosity of her patron.

“Ah, very interesting.” Elach said.

The woman narrowed her eyes at Elach as if he was a customer she’d failed to sell something to, but her smile returned a split second later.

“I can see you don’t understand the worth of this prize. A single berry would let you grow a tree of your own, and you could graft the branch onto a tree with mimicking properties to grow your own tree.” The woman explained, walking up to the display case then pausing as she got closer to Elach. “Oh, you’re not looking for a new patron. Do try to remember us whenever you are ready for another bond.”

“Oh, of course.” Elach said, turning to leave. “Most certainly.”

The woman stepped back into the shadows, and Elach didn’t so much as look back as he continued his search. She didn’t even tell him who she was representing. Was it supposed to be obvious from the way she was dressed, or maybe the way she melted into the shadows?

Elach got about a quarter of the way through the ground floor’s first row before another person appeared, but this one was simply sitting in a folding chair between two display cases that each held burning embers; one case had purple embers that popped and crackled like they were still inside a roaring fire, the other containing glowing orange embers with a myriad of flowing runes etched onto each one.

“Any interest in fire Issi?” The woman sitting in the chair asked, looking up from her book over circular glasses with red-tinted lenses.

“Not at the moment.” Elach said. “But maybe you could convince me.”

“Probably not.” The woman said with a sad smile, but she closed her book and stood anyway. She wore a long sleeved red shirt and dark blue pants, but other than that she had nothing indicating what patron she was apprenticed to. “To my left are hexwood coals from my patron’s home forest. They’ll burn hot until you stop supplying them with Issi, and if you grind them down with water into a paste they make a fine Issi accelerant.”

The woman then gestured at the purple coals, one of them cracking and springing up to tap the top of the display case as she did. “And these are wormwood coals. My patron made them herself to work as a source of fire Issi for her apprentices to recharge on the go, and for us to use as our first fire Issi focus.”

The woman stood as if she’d just finished her spiel, but Elach had been expecting more. He could find better coals in the bottom of Sentence’s fireplace. “Is… this it?” He asked, and grimaced when he heard how he’d sounded.

“Told you I wouldn’t be able to convince you.” The woman chuckled mirthlessly. “My patron doesn’t have much to offer outside of her Issi, unfortunately.”

Elach studied the popping purple coals for a second as the woman sat back down in her chair. “If you don’t mind me asking, how many apprentices do you think will go for your patron?”

“Two? Maybe three?” The woman said with a shrug. “She’ll send out requests to the top sixty four and anyone who catches her eye in the lower ranks, but we’re lucky to get even one person from all of those requests. So she accepts pretty much everyone else who approaches her, which is usually one or two more people.”

Three apprentices per year. No, per half year, since this happens once per equinox. And Rainshear had said she only had three apprentices total, which Elach seemed to remember her saying was the average for patrons of her strength. There was something else at play here.