“…there are many hypotheses about how the aerlands came to be. The first hypothesis is that they were originally part of the great seas separating our lands; the second is that they are the remnants of what remained after the great rift that scars Alkerdia; that is the Chasm sundered the North West from the South East. But I say that is preposterous; the most viable hypothesis is that they were originally part of Eryth’s fourth moon that toppled out of the heavens when the old gods fought and what remains of it are the aerlands that sojourn our skies…” –a transcription of a public discourse by controversial [Geographical Sage] Keanu Silvertongue.

She didn’t come for dinner that night. Before then, Arthur thought the food tasting better with other people was just a saying people used to encourage sharing. Now he wasn't so sure.

The food tasted bland. No, perhaps bland was too strong a word. Subdued was more like it. The taste seemed muted. The youth was locked in a loop of the what ifs and the what could have been. There was no conclusion to it.

' Why do I feel sorry for her?' he mulled. 'Sure, everyone's got a sob story. No one's perfect...but why can't she just leave?'

The keep was so quiet, there was no pitter patter of the draconic woman’s feet on the bare stone floors or her archaic diction to accompany conversation. Her speech and mannerisms were haughty, brash even. But, Arthur would've been the first to say that she was just bad at expressing herself.

Her conventions of things could not be applied to human standards. Her punishment was brutal, rewards were rather offhanded, as if she was doing someone a favour. But it was the only way she knew how to interact with him.

Truth be told however, there were many times that Arthur saw his life flashing before his eyes. Like training, sometimes the woman never pulled her punches, and by day’s end he'd be sore in more places than he could count on one hand.

If Arthur could compare his association with the draconic woman to something, it would be that she was like a mother, stumbling over her parenting for the first time. Or a big sister, tough on him because she knew she had to get him accustomed to holding his own against the neighbourhood bully.

That could surely explain why she was so heavy-handed with him, expecting nothing short of being thorough with everything. Either that, or he was the one rationalizing everything she did.

Call it paranoia, but Aeskyre really put the fear of Eryth in him, just so he could take things seriously. She understood that for someone whose common sense was not of Eryth, she had to browbeat some of it into him until it stuck.

“Right, yeah…that's what a masochist would say, eh?” Arthur spoke out loud. He looked over his shoulders as if half-expecting Aeskyre to drop out of thin air and pick on him for his utterances.

So despite his treatment, Arthur was grateful. Profusely so. Without her, he would have sunk into depression, given up before he saw what good things Eryth had to offer.

Without her, he would've been floundering around like a new born with no direction at all. It was understandable, she knew through experience what that felt like, and she was resolved that none of that would happen to him.

'Aeskyre really saved my life twice over huh? I owe her for real.'

Woe was he. What he would give to just have her silence as long as she was somewhere he could see her. Dejected, even a bit of shuteye was almost elusive;he was left staring at the bed’s magical canopy until it lulled him into a restless sleep.

Arthur knew that if he led his mood spiral down any further, he would be trapped in a rabbit-hole, with scenarios that would never come to pass. He’d already been there before.

Thus, he picked another evil, lesser compared to melancholy; workaholism. He put his nose to the grindstone, wanting to lose the heavy clouds hanging over his head.

In the mornings, he trained with the sword, repeating the Gusting Swallows and Lightning Shrike sword arts over and over again, beating them into his muscles like a smith tempering steel. If [Regeneration] could return control of an amputated arm to him, how could ruptured muscles even compare?

If his arms seem like they couldn't hold anything larger than a penknife after swinging the heavy hunk of a wooden sword, he would be in the study. He’d already learned some of the most basic of chore magic, cantrips for [Light], [Cleanse], [Ignition] and [Aqua]. Cantrips were literally common sense that even Erythean children could learn.

It also then that he learnt bound magecraft, the intermediate between spellcraft and runecraft. He learnt how to anchor wards on magestone to be used as an alarm system. It was also there that he found that he could anchor spells to gestures. It was pretty nifty for the small spells he’d learnt. For example, he could snap thrice to cast [Ignition] from his thumb like a gaslighter.

He also spared no quarter on what he considered pertinent to keeping his head on his shoulders both literally and figuratively.

There was no way he was going to get duped by wily merchants just because he didn’t know his coppers and bronzes. Or pay with his neck on the block because he unknowingly stepped on an important personage’s toes.

In a dog-eat-dog world, it was writ-large that you kept your wits and brawn about you. That, or you were dead, there was no in between. At least if he was going to stand out for being partially ignorant he would rather be better than the next native from the boonies.

Contrarily, if he deemed his hands steady enough to do rune work, he would be in the workshop attending to his mana engine. It was his ticket to living on his own terms. A launch pad to enjoy one of his creature comforts; he was a man used to getting everywhere fast.

There was no way he’d regress to medieval-sque modes of transport like horse-drawn carriages and aerships that bowed to the whims of the elements.

Not that he was going to be traveling in inclement weather, but you couldn’t blame a man for trying. Less dependence on mana sails meant less risk of falling out of the skies. when something so much did them in. Sails were just big targets. It was going to take some time to get something flight-worthy, but it was a step in the right direction.

It could take months or years to scrounge up enough gold to get the material to build an aership from the ground up. However, the engine was already half of it; he could wait.

Maybe he would become an adventurer or something. Or if he deemed himself too chicken to jump headfirst into danger, he could do something safe... like his magic, for instance. There was no shortage of people using magic items right?

The most challenging part of all his preparations was plotting a route to the nearest town. There was no global positioning system in this world. Short of scrying spells to see where you were going. You had to use known landmarks and read maps that did not zoom in or zoom out or point you in the right direction. That is, unless you had a magical map which Arthur didn't have despite Aeskyre's largesse.

And compasses could always misbehave when you most needed them. Who knew what throwing mana into the mix could do to the planet’s magnetic poles? Did it even have poles in the first place? He didn’t know if it was a spheroid. For all he knew, it might have well been a dodecahedron, because in Eryth, pigs might have grown wings and flown.

From Sturm’s Keep, the nearest settlement large enough to give him a semblance of modern civilization was Aldmoor and its dwarven outpost called Chasm's Edge an aer port.

To get there, he would have to cross three biomes if he used the overland route; traversing a desert, then a mountain range and after that, a dense forest that could put the Amazon to shame.

Finally, he had to cross the rift that divided North west and South east Alkerd known as the Chasm. That was a non-issue because then he would already be within eyeshot of the harbor. That was essentially the shortest route.

If he detoured around the forest that was the Great Vale, it would take him close to a month just to cross it. And that was assuming he didn’t get eaten or lose his way in a sea of trees.

The other option was traveling by air, following a series of aerlands that had obelisks serving as magical communication arrays. These were remnants of a bygone civilization that was as old, if not older, than the one that inhabited Sturm’s Keep.

He could use them as waypoints to rest and resupply, and if he was lucky, he could hitch a ride on a passing aership. That said, it had its own share of peril if he were to run to a weyr of wyverns. He was sure his spells and magic had grown, but he was only one man, and if they managed to swarm him, he was done for.

At that, Arthur shuddered as he looked over the map. It was a brown paper, yellowing at the edges that looked like papyrus. Surprisingly, the mapwork and legends were done in vivid, unfading colors. They had to be made of magical ink.

Sturm’s Keep was marked at the bottom right of the map, in faded charcoal. It was the work of Glaggis Wundersteel, an explorer who had stumbled into Aeskyre on her bad day. Nearer the bottom was a meandering line that was part dashes of blue and dashes of brown. It was not so hard to see that it might have been a seasonal river or a river that disappeared and reappeared aboveground. The fact that it was called the Vanishing River might have been the latter.

South of this river, peeked a land with a legend of green and red palms called the Ossyrian Sands. There was not much information on it; neither were there more accurate maps than the one he had at hand that hadn't been blasted to ashes by lightning breath. Therefore, Arthur was stuck with moving north of the Vanishing River, through the Dust.

The Dust Bowl or the Dust as it was simply called was , a semi-arid wasteland of dust-blown ancient ruins and dunes. It deemed was a no man’s land inhabited by wandering desert clans who made their homes in the oases dotting the most intact of these ruins. The travel journal he’d picked the map from mentioned that the desert clans were not beholden to any known power and ran resupply points.

He was rather queasy about using a dead man’s possessions, but he needed it more than they did. It made his plan doubly easier to just note the landmarks that they had used to trace his steps to civilization; the owner must have used a low-flying aership. Unfortunately, there were none intact for him to use and even if there were, he did not fancy himself a sailor.

Alongside interesting plants like some aromatic shrubs, it also chronicled the owner’s encounters with monsters and beasts of the wastelands.

There was a distinction he had to review in the bestiary; beasts were just ordinary animals, while monsters were those that had awakened to mana and, as a result, had uncanny abilities depending on the environment. The mana made them either cunning or feral, and they were very territorial. Monsters just didn’t like someone guzzling up the mana on their own turf and all that.

Among the creatures he had to watch out for were the llimu, Eryth’s terror-birds that could run him down if he was not careful and the duskhounds, canines that roved the desert in packs. They had russet fur and liked to hunt at dusk making for very cunning abushers.

With his hoverboard, Arthur was cock-sure of being the fastest thing across the dunes but he was no less cautious about stumbling into unknown perils.

‘‘Well then,” Arthur sighed after looking over the other likely threats. “ Onto supplies, I need a tent, obviously. I think there’s some type of oiled leather in the workshop somewhere,” he muttered, drawing a rough sketch of a dome tent with supporting frames sewn into its corners. “ And then alumi―, faesteel rods for the supports. “

He wasn't sure why that was familiar, but he suddenly found himself excited at the prospect of camping out.

“ Water, light, food, weapons,” he muttered, tapping his pen in thought. In light of his [Inventory Chest], his logistical problem was not how much to carry but what. While he’d learnt cantrips for water and light, there was no reason for him to forgo actual artifacts, like a lux hurricane-lamp or a water flask that refilled .

Arthur had made the water flask himself way back when he was still training and wanted to have some water at hand. He’d made the thing double-walled, using magestone sandwiched between two dwarf steel and faesteel.

A dwarven [Rune Smith] would have baulked were they to realize what Arthur had done with such precious material; mostly the magestone. That the thing made from a flight of fancy even worked was pure luck.

And that was also possible only because magestone could actually be melted down and worked like clay in its molten form. He enchanted an aquamarine gem as the focus of the runecraft, and there, he had a magical flask modelled after the one he’d come with. Food was abundant.

Arthur didn’t feel like he’d lack anything with the menagerie of a pantry that sat in the kitchen. He planned out a schedule to cook and deposit the food into his [Inventory Chest] while it was still hot.

[Inventory Chest] had stasis just like Aeskyre’s fancy tupperware; he’d proved that there was no energy loss or movement of time inside of it. It’s only limitation was that active spells could not be stored. Besides that, he’d learnt to visualize the [Inventory Chest] as an ephemeral divider. Regardless of an item’s size, his visualization would always warp his perception such that everything was uniform in size; such was the peculiarity of spatial magic.