Vonn thought of toys and tools from hobbies he'd picked up and dropped. At the time he hadn't appreciated the lengths his old parents had gone to, in encouraging his interests.

"You all right?" asked Birb.

"Yeah. Just... thinking back. As for projects, my third Engineer level came from a bicycle and a phonograph. Birb's second came from some printing-press machinery. How about a phonograph? There's not a whole lot of metal in it, and we can sell it. As for the smithing, maybe more tools?"

"Did that last time."

"Wind gun lock mechanism?"

"That's my new band's name!" exclaimed Birb. Vonn looked at her, puzzled. She said, "Selen and I were making up silly names."

Ashfall said, "A lock would be an Engineer thing, though."

"Sure, but Urika did them before he got much into engineering. Just make sure the gods understand you don't want fiddly impractical powers and what you're really training for is to make a really big gun."

Ashfall shivered at the thought, though whether that was good, Vonn wasn't sure. "I'll try," she said.

"And Birb, if you want to try Mage, I'm no longer a complete idiot at magic. Or if you want Craftsman, ask my parents. Or why not your Dad, for cooking and business?"

"Maybe," she said, dithering.

Ashfall began work on a lock. Vonn had made a point of committing his designs to paper, with assembly steps and some notion of drawing everything from multiple angles and estimating size tolerances and materials. If he did nothing else in this life it was a good tradition to start. Let the high-level wizards keep their secrets; Engineers would be more open!

He thought of the expert Mage, Ralator. There was a man who believed in teaching freely. He should have an actual wizard school, with magic broom contests or something.

Birb tugged on Vonn's tail for attention. He wasn't sure he'd ever get used to that. "My Dad's taught me a little about magic, but do you think you could show me more?"

So in between giving Ashfall some pointers, he sat with Birb and worked through the different kinds of magic. Force, elemental, geomancy, healing... and necromancy. "That one I can't teach you."

"Shouldn't you learn it too?" she asked.

He frowned, but she had a point. "If I'm going to learn more about the dungeon, I ought to. For now, how about a basic healing spell? Everybody can use that."

#

He had a sort of vacation, so long as he stopped by often to mind the shop. He sat in a stone room, cross-legged, cycling through the various elements. Selen had described her own practice as being like tuning a radio to find stations. He was thinking in terms of the eight elements being just one type of spellcasting, available in positive, neutral and negative aspects and several delivery methods. Elemental energy seemed, like raw force, to always be neutral. Probably.

He'd mostly learned the basic spells of cold, sound and light so far. He experimented further and found dust sticking to his fingers. Pushing that "station" harder caused tiny pebbles to materialize between his hands. He laughed in delight.

Birb peeked in. "Something good?"

"Rocks!"

"That doesn't sound very important."

"Any little trick we can do can potentially be expanded into something bigger. An earth-attuned crystal can help reshape ground, right? Why not use that to build roads and break rocks?"

"Selen said they use icy water jets to break rocks, at least at one quarry near Grandbridge." She sighed wistfully. "I want to see more places, too."

"Aren't you from somewhere out east?"

"Yeah. Some... bad things happened, and Dad took me here to start a new life." She fluffed out her wings. "I'll let you get back to studying. Um. Thanks for letting me do all this. It's been fun."

"You're helping out already. And don't feel like you have to be an Engineer forever if you find something better."

Vonn went back to practicing. He got the pebble-making down and returned to cycling through the elements he knew, finding no more yet. Shifting focus into raw force felt jarring at first, but he could feel how it wasn't a completely different kind of mental activity. He could hold out his hand and make a hanging string wobble, not a great achievement.

It was a good idea to keep learning raw power, but it was even better to have more understanding. One of the gaps in his knowledge was an unpleasant one.

#

He walked to the riverside home of the Bonefire Guild. He'd once mistaken their white stone edifice for a temple. It smelled of embalming fluid and of the decaying plants kept here. Within their simple outer fence, two trainees were wrangling a dead man whose flesh had turned to leather. The shambling movements of the white-masked thing sickened him. It might well have been a Shieldpoint villager who'd died a few years ago.

One of the necromancers saw him. "You seem repelled."

Vonn forced his flat-back ears to stand up straight. "I'm sorry. It's unnerving to see these."

"But necessary."

"Sometimes, I suppose."

"What brings you to look at them?" The Human man wore robes of dark ashen grey and might have been in his twenties.

"I want to learn a little about what you do, because of the dungeon problem."

The other man was a young Vulin, who paused in an awkward spell gesture. "Wait. You're that flying fox, aren't you?"

Vonn smiled and bowed slightly. "Vonn, the chandlers' son. How is the pulproot harvest going?"

"It's been successful. Apparently there's an easy magical trick to it. So the farmers can grow more of that stuff in the future. The higher-ups seem less enthused, though."

Vonn answered candidly. "I think they were hoping to have all the profit from that harvest."

"We're trying to help the peasants. I grew up expecting to dig in the dirt all my life. Now, well, I have others to do that for me."

Vonn tried not to wince. "You've heard that our local dungeon monsters count as undead, right?"

The Human apprentice said, "Our group's been trying to not say a lot about Kolm's Fell publicly. Those printer kids made people think we somehow caused this."