When Erden wakes up, he smiles when his eyes meet yours, and runs his fingers behind your ears, making them semi-involuntarily wiggle a bit. He wishes you a good morning, and you stay like that for a few...seconds? Minutes? Hours? Who is to say?

Eventually, Erden turns over to put on his choker, but he hesitates. You sit up behind him as he meticulously inspects it with his eyes.

“You don’t need to wear it if you don’t want to.” You tell him.

“It’s not that, I just...I had a dream where the chain broke-- I’m glad it’s still in one piece.” He gives you a warm smile as he puts it on. “We need to head down to the Adventurer’s guild, right? I’d hate to be late and leave a bad impression with Himoto and Mizu.”

He’s right, of course-- there is no Eorzean less patient than Mizu, unless you give her a very good reason to wait. ‘Chocolate-dipped croissants’ kind of good, mind you. Erden heads down to the thaumaturge’s guild to pick up Mizu while you head down to the Quicksands to check up on Himoto.

Himoto is already awake and eating breakfast at a table by the time you arrive, so you sit down next to him and ask him if he’s excited for your trip today, to which he passively nods. After a moment of awkward silence, you pull out your grimoire and re-examine the spells you’ve made recently.

Pulling up physick, you pull out your quill to begin making modifications based on the runes in your notebook, but are interrupted when Himoto gently taps your shoulder. He points to your tome, so you hand it over to him, and he turns through the pages you had just flipped through and pulls up Fluid Aura.

Next, he pulls his spear off his back and places it on the table in front of you, pointing near its base, which shares the same eight-sided star rune as the core of your spell. However, the star rune seems to be just the beginning in his case. A centerline spirals up the spear, with multiple separate runes and carvings which stem off from it. You take the time to copy down each of them into your notebook before asking him what they do.

He pauses for a moment before getting up and signaling you to follow him. Down by the Gladiator’s Guild, you pull aside a spare striking dummy, and he shows you up close the intricacies of using such a weapon. His right hand always remains firmly on the base, covering the star carving, while his left hand shifts around somewhat to cover separate runes.

When he begins to channel aether into the spear, the centerline emits a gentle blue glow, and small harmless bubbles appear at the top. Then, each time he channels aether into one of the side runes, it unleashes a magical attack. As the attack goes off, his spear floats away and back to him, twisting as it does so. Ambient water vapor from the air is drawn in with each cast before being launched forward in the magic attack itself.

He demonstrates a few to you-- a ranged water spear, a torrent of water, and even creates a water-rope to pull his lance back in after throwing it like a harpoon. You try your best to take as detailed of notes as you can, but these runes are unlike any you have ever seen before, and it doesn’t help that the entire demonstration is non-verbal, either.

This does help you greatly understand what Fluid Aura really is-- a crude use of water mixed with general binding geometry to lash someone to the ground. Really, it’s a miracle that the spell works at all.

This also gives you an appreciation for what Himoto’s spellcasting involves. In a way, it’s sort of like playing a very large flute. He also demonstrates that he can cast without using the carvings, but you suspect it’s much more draining for him in the same way it is for you. You thank him for his help, and he pats your head.

By the time you return to the Quicksands, Erden and Mizu are already there. Erden looks...very tired, and Mizu has covered the entire table with diagrams. She gets very upset with you when you clean up all her loose papers, until you remind her that they have a job to do, and sitting around talking about spells won’t do anyone much good, words which burn your tongue the moment they leave your mouth.

Luckily they are precisely the words you needed to say, as Mizu immediately springs up and gets her affairs in order to leave. Erden gives you a big, exhausted hug and thanks you for saving him. You promise you won’t leave him alone with her again, at least for the rest of this adventure.

The Sil’dih ruins are just a few hundred yalms out of Ul’dah, and luckily at the time of your investigation were devoid of guards. Mizu had some difficulty getting over the large columns that obstructed the main entrance, so Himoto and Erden lifted her up together to get her over the larger chunks of slate.

Mizu sets the end of her staff on fire to serve as a torch. You initially freak out a bit, but she assures you that this time, her staff is fireproof, so there is nothing to worry about. Erden asks if it’s a good idea to use a fire-based light source when you are heading into an underground civilization, but you inform him that it will help you know for sure if there is oxygen where you travel.

In the depths of the ruins, there are occasional zombies still set about from when the city-state fell-- a long-lasting consequence of the city’s twisted use of dark magic to create an army of their dead. Luckily, your newly recreated holy magic cuts through zombie flesh as a warm knife does with butter, unmaking their flesh and bone into what it should have been all along-- a frail, aged corpse.

Mizu gets up and close with a defeated ghoul and you remind her to be careful. Not because you believe in the hocus-pocus superstition that zombie bites will turn the bitten into zombies, but because rotting corpses carry all manner of diseases on them, and it would do her well not to get sick and die on a simple ruin excursion. She tells you that she is being careful, but it’s important to get a thorough look.

Even in a decimated state, the architecture of Sil’dih is quite admirable. They have a clear love of columns and long, wide corridors, likely as a display of the immense wealth and prosperity of their citizens. Seeing the state it's in now makes your heart ache, imagining what could have been. Alas, it was not meant to be.

Deeper into the ruins, you encounter a gang of bandits. Obviously, fighting with bandits was not your intended goal, but your words fall on deaf ears as they ready their weapons, so instead they feel the full destructive force of a party of adventurers. Just as an archer in the back of the room begins to draw an arrow, Mizu sends a large fireblast whizzing past their leader and directly into them. The archer is slammed back into the wall, and falls unconscious as their clothes are set ablaze from the impact.

Threads of water flow from the air into Himoto’s lance until violently erupting into a torrent of water, knocking the bandit leader off his legs and onto the floor. He does not take any time to follow up with a diving lunge straight into the poor man’s chest, leaving him very dead. A dual-wielding assassin tries to rush you and Mizu, but Erden brings the full weight of his axe onto their head, causing their body to go limp on the tile. With a room now bereft of bandits, you are free to continue your investigation.

Himoto looks through their entire stash of goods, carelessly shoving aside small mountains of gil in search of the gem he is after. Erden collects around a hundred thousand gil and gives it to you, saying that it will make up for what Fyrgeiss took from you, and so you hand it off to Mizu since she had already paid you back.

None of the bandits you defeated were Arcanists, so you have nothing to gain from inspecting their bodies. Instead, you scavenge the walls for runes of any kind that might help with your studies. While you do so, you try your best to make small talk, though only one topic comes to mind.

“Did you hear about what happened to Fyregeiss, Erden?” You ask, and try your best to measure his response.

“What, did he get a promotion?” Erden asks with an air of smugness about him.

“No, he was killed last night by some shadow assassin.”

“...” Erden continues for a moment to sift through some of the random garbage the bandits were lugging about. “Well, that’s...a good thing, right? He was hurting a lot of people. It’s a shame that didn’t happen before you were fined.”

“Yes,” you turn to him. “I just wish I knew who did it, so I could thank them for...helping Ul’dah.” He doesn’t seem to have anything to say about that, so you go back to looking at carvings in the walls. Unfortunately, there is naught to be gained from them. All studying them seems to do is make you a bit sad as you behold torn tapestry after broken tile after burnt bookshelf.

Himoto lets out a gentle gasp as he reaches all the way down to the bottom of a big bag of gil before yoinking out a massive diamond-like gem. After a moment of examining it he sighs and drops it back into the bag. Mizu snatches it right back up after he turns and walks back toward the entrance of the room, citing that it will make for an excellent staff focus.

The rest of the ruins prove to be similarly lacking as it seems that the ruined city of Sil’dih is almost entirely without any formal magic institutions at all. This leaves a puzzle in your mind that you can’t seem to shake away. You would expect that the most dangerous parts of Sil’dih magic to have been taken away, but mages have a habit of leaving little things that are easy for bureaucrats and soldiers to overlook-- a hidden set of magic runes here, a tapestry or tome there, and yet...Sil’dih is almost as non-magical as you have ever seen it.

You do manage to find a handful of thaumaturgy staves, but you can tell by their Ul’dah insignias that they were brought there somewhat recently. How did a prosperous city that had magic powerful enough to turn their dead back to life also not have a strong enough magic program to have it endure the ravages of time?

This trip does end up being a big waste of time, but hey, you do all walk out much wealthier than you entered after helping yourselves to a few leftover bags of gil. In hindsight, this is probably one of the most ethically dubious things you have ever done, but as your great and wise father S’jaro Nunh once told you, ‘If you steal, you’ll go far in life, as long as you’re clever enough to get away with it.’

On your way out of the ruins, Himoto happens upon a rock that he seems enamored with. As far as you can tell, it’s...just a beige, somewhat smooth rock. Not even perfectly smooth or anything like that, just...a rock. Either way, he holds it carefully with some loose cloth from his shirt, and you can swear that he cradles it when you’re not looking.

Mizu rushes back to the Thaumaturge’s guild as she wants her amazing new diamond staff to be created as soon as possible, especially now that she has all of this money to purge on its making. You see Himoto back to his Inn room along with Erden, and wish him a good night’s rest.

As you turn to leave, he tugs at your shirt and, after a moment of looking at it mournfully, hands you the rock he took from the ruins. You...take it, though you’re not really sure why. He bows to you, and you bow back in kind. You keep the rock, not because you’re like...a fan of it, or anything, but because it seemed important to him, and therefore it has value in itself.

Erden asks if you want to name it, and after a bit of consideration, you name this rock Carby. After a few seconds of processing, Erden bursts into laughter, and can’t seem to stop for the remaining walk home.