Glint hopped back onto my shoulder as we made our way out of the archives, the grand doors closing behind us with a heavy thud. Outside, the sky was just beginning to fade to late afternoon; the sun slanting golden light across the city’s towers. The air was cooler up here, touched by the scent of incense and old parchment.
The route Calla led us along curved through a quieter section of the upper city—still busy, still alive, but less chaotic than the market sprawl we’d passed through earlier. Winding streets gave way to tiled courtyards and high arches, stone buildings layered with ivy and gilded signs. Statues of scholars and mages stood in elegant poses, overlooking lecture halls, potion shops, and what looked suspiciously like a dueling ring disguised as a “theoretical conflict resolution space.”
“This is the Artisans’ Quarter,” Calla said, her voice lighter now. “Mostly scholars, mages-in-training, and master crafters. A lot of teaching goes on here.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “Definitely not my kind of crowd.”
She grinned. “Don’t worry. You look only mildly out of place.”
I gave her a mock scowl, which she returned with a dry smirk. Glint yawned like he was over both of us.
We rounded another corner, stepping out onto a broad stone plaza filled with a scattered ring of booths and banners—each one manned by enthusiastic-looking attendants handing out scrolls and enchanted pamphlets. A floating sign bobbed above the scene, shimmering letters spelling out:
“The Path Forward: Profession Registration and Demonstration Fair,”
Calla slowed. So did I.
There were alchemists brewing potions that glowed like fireworks. Blacksmiths demonstrating hammerwork with mana-fused ore. Scribes enchanting nameplates mid-air. Even a tamer was showing off a miniature phoenix that kept sneezing sparks.
I just stood there, staring.
Professions.
It wasn’t something I’d ever thought about—not really. I knew they existed. Knew you could train in them, specialize, use them to make gold or support a party. But they all cost something. Time. Training. Gold. None of which I’d ever had in surplus.
It had always felt… out of reach.
Calla stepped up beside me, watching the phoenix do a looping dive through a conjured ring of fire.
“I’ve got a couple levels in Enchanting,” she said casually. “Enough to label gear, reinforce scrolls, inscribe minor effects.”
I glanced at her. “You’ve never mentioned it.”
She shrugged. “Not much to mention. Can’t do anything too useful yet.”
“Still,” I said quietly, eyes on the booths. “That’s… something.”
We stood there, watching the plaza buzz with color and motion. A whole world of possibility we’d never really stopped to consider.
Glint climbed higher on my shoulder, tail flicking as if to say, Well?
 
The system recognized seven core professions.
I knew that. I’d known it in the abstract for a while, the same way you know the capital city has walls or that dragons breathe fire. But it didn’t really click until I was standing there, elbow to elbow with a dozen apprentices and hopefuls in the middle of the Artisans’ Quarter, watching the world reassemble itself from scraps and smoke.
Calla had called it the “scenic route” back from the archives.
Scenic, my ass. This was a trap. A well-lit, well-organized, professionally labeled trap.
A row of guild tents and learning halls, each marked by their trade. Seven professions. Seven ways to carve out a name for yourself outside of battle.
 
Clothier. The first tent we passed had mannequins lined up like soldiers in full battle regalia—spell-stitched cloaks, enchanted gloves, even armored coats with shifting camouflage enchantments that rippled when you got too close. A tailor was hemming something that looked suspiciously like a wizard’s bathrobe while a couple of kids argued about thread types nearby. It was a weird mix of fashion, function, and full-blown magical chaos. I didn’t know a thing about sewing, but damn if it wasn’t cool.
 
Weaponsmith. A forge blazed at the next tent, and the clang of metal on metal rang like punctuation across the square. Blades, bows, staves, throwing axes—they had it all. One smith was hammering out a double-headed glaive while muttering an incantation under her breath. Another was testing a wand by shooting fireworks into the sky. It was loud, hot, and a little dangerous, which honestly made it kind of appealing.
 
Enchanter. Down a narrower lane, I saw a wall of floating crystals slowly rotating around a workbench, each glowing with etched runes. A young man was threading mana into a pendant with such focus that I almost didn’t want to blink, in case I messed him up telepathically. Calla drifted that way immediately—obviously—but I followed, too. One of the booths had a charm that hummed when you lied. Another had a pair of boots that “helped with personal confidence.” I didn’t even know what that meant, but I wanted to try them on.
 
Alchemist. Their space was fenced off, probably for everyone’s safety. Bottles clinked and hissed on shelves. There were entire racks of herbs drying in the open air, and a sign that read: “Taste at your own risk.” One cauldron belched out pink smoke. Another was bubbling green. The woman tending them had wild hair, safety goggles, and the sort of grin that said she either knew exactly what she was doing or absolutely didn’t. Either way, I respected the vibe.
 
Scribe. Ink-stained fingers, rune-etched quills, scrolls that pulsed faintly with stored spells. One guy was bent over a desk, tracing glyphs with an enchanted pen that corrected his posture every time he slouched. The air smelled like parchment and quiet ambition. I found myself lingering longer than expected. Maybe it was the magic in the margins, or maybe just the sheer calm of it all, but it felt… steady. Precise. Powerful in a way I hadn’t considered.
 
Tinkerer. Easily the loudest tent by a mile. Gears whirred. Mana crystals blinked. A half-finished automaton waved at me with one hand and tried to hammer its own head with the other. People were tinkering with gadgets, testing bombs in a magically sealed pit, or selling gadgets that clipped onto boots and “enhanced terrain traversal” (aka made you jump higher). It was a chaotic brilliance, and I could feel my fingers itching to mess with something I definitely wasn’t qualified to touch.A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
 
Dismantler. The last tent was quieter. Simpler. But no less interesting. One side of it was stacked with broken gear—armor with melted runes, shattered swords, cracked gemstones. Inside, people worked with surgical precision, extracting shards, melting down scrap, reclaiming parts for future use. It was like alchemy, smithing, and puzzle-solving all rolled into one. A girl no older than me was carefully breaking apart an old staff and humming to herself as she worked, like it wasn’t even stressful. Like it was… satisfying. Therapeutic even.
 
I turned in a slow circle, eyes jumping from forge to parchment to enchanted scarf racks.
It was a lot.
Too much, maybe.
The alchemy tent was roped off like someone was expecting it to explode. Which, judging by the bubbling cauldrons and the charred stains on the grass outside, seemed… fair.
Glint sniffed the air, then immediately sneezed and buried his face in my hood.
A woman near the entrance was adjusting her goggles with the casual confidence of someone who’d absolutely lost her eyebrows to science before and had no regrets. Her coat was stained with every color of the rainbow and maybe three more I didn’t have names for. Bottles clinked on every shelf behind her. Runes glowed on the floor in patterns I was 80% sure weren’t entirely legal.
She caught me peeping and waved me over with a ladle. Not even a spoon. A ladle.
“You! You look like someone with steady hands and a flexible sense of smell. Ever brewed before?”
I coughed. “Uh… tea?”
“Close enough. Here.” She shoved a mortar and pestle into my hands, then dropped a handful of dried purple leaves into the bowl. “Crush these. Not too fine. We want them crushed, not obliterated.”
“…Got it.”
The moment I started grinding, the leaves released a sharp minty tang, followed by an eye-watering undertone of something… aggressive. Like if eucalyptus had a knife collection.
“Now add three drops of the red bottle—not four, unless you want to see time sideways.”
“Totally not terrifying,” I muttered, but did it anyway.
The liquid hissed on contact and turned bright gold. The woman beamed.
“Perfect! You’ve got a touch for it.” She offered a soot-stained hand. “Gloria. Lead herbal chaos artist and reluctant tent owner. You?”
“Felix,” I said, still holding the pestle like it might explode. “Mostly just trying not to catch fire.”
She grinned. “You’re already ahead of most.”
She poured the mixture into a narrow flask and sealed it with a flick of her fingers, muttering a quick binding charm. The flask pulsed faintly.
“What does it do?” I asked, already preparing myself for something absurd.
“I’m honestly not certain. I’ll test it on my apprentice later.”
“Do they know that?”
“They will when they wake up.”
I stared at the bottle. It shimmered like it knew things it wasn’t supposed to. Like it was planning something.
And I kind of loved it.
Because alchemy wasn’t about control, not really. It was about possibility. About throwing ingredients into a cauldron with just enough precision to make something potentially useful.
It was messy. It was dangerous. It was weird.
And there was something about that chaos, that experimentation, that made the gears in my head spin in all the right ways.
I handed back the tools and thanked the alchemist, who was already scribbling notes about “pungency thresholds” and “viscosity indexes.”
Glint popped his head out of my hood and let out a low, suspicious sniff.
“Yeah,” I said, smiling faintly. “I don’t think we’re done here.”
Alchemy wasn’t what I expected at all, but it looked fun.
By the time I stumbled out of the alchemy tent, blinking through a haze of mint, ambition, and something I was pretty sure would make my tongue glow, I was reeling a little.
Not from the fumes. Not entirely.
Just… from the possibility of it all.
I hadn’t expected to like alchemy. But there was something about the chaos, the barely-contained madness of it, that stuck with me. That alchemist had shoved a bowl into my hands and treated me like I belonged there. Like I wasn’t just some clueless drifter poking at the edges of magic, hoping it wouldn’t poke back harder.
And the weird thing?
For a second—I had felt like I belonged.
 
Glint wriggled out of my hood and stretched with the theatrical grace of a cat recovering from a traumatic sneeze. He gave me a sniff like he was checking for residual potions and then promptly climbed back onto my shoulder, tail flicking with disapproval.
“I know,” I muttered, stepping back into the plaza. “That could’ve gone worse.”
A sharp pop-hiss-crackle interrupted my moment of reflection.
I jumped. So did Glint.
A metal sphere bounced off the cobbles a few feet away and detonated in a puff of green smoke and a giggle that sounded… mischievous.
“That one’s not supposed to laugh,” someone muttered nearby.
I turned toward the source of the voice and found myself face-to-face with another kind of chaos entirely.
The Tinkerer tent looked less like a workspace and more like a mechanical accident that had decided to become a lifestyle. Gears spun. Crystals blinked. A sign over the entrance had three different slogans, each cycling in a different mood. I caught “Invent Boldly” and “We Accept Liability In Spirit Only” before it flipped to a shrug symbol made of wires.
A woman crouched beside a cluttered bench waved the smoking sphere in the air with a dramatic flourish. Then she noticed me watching.
“What?” she said. “Never seen a misfiring chuckle bomb before?”
“…Is it supposed to do that?”
“Absolutely not. You here to make one?”
I blinked. “I just came from the alchemy tent.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Perfect. You’ve already survived something weird. Come on.”
Before I could object, I was standing at her bench, surrounded by twitching tools and suspiciously glowing widgets. She shoved a strange-looking wrench into my hand and pointed at what appeared to be a clockwork butterfly tangled in copper thread.
“Hold this. And don’t twist it unless you want it to sing sea shanties backwards.”
I didn’t twist it.
I did, however, watch with something like awe as she adjusted a delicate series of rune-etched gears, muttered a spell under her breath, and brought the butterfly back to life. Its wings fluttered. Its antennae flicked. It buzzed once, happily, and then landed on Glint’s head.
He went still. Shocked. Then sniffed it once and allowed it to stay.
The woman grinned. “He’s got taste.”
I couldn’t stop staring. At the butterfly. The bench. The sheer mechanical poetry of it all.
“I’m not a crafter,” I said, almost to myself.
She shot me a look. “You say that like it means something.”
And somehow, between the alchemist who trusted me with explosive mint leaves and the tinkerer who handed me a wrench like it was a birthright, something in my chest shifted.
Not all at once.
But just enough.
Enough to make me wonder… what if I was?
What if I could be?
I handed the wrench back and stepped away from the bench, the cube-beetle chirping at me from the corner and the butterfly still perched like a crown on Glint’s head.
The woman gave me a lazy salute. “You get the itch, you come back. Tinkering’s not about rules—it’s about figuring out what you can make before the mana fizzles or the mayor complains.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
But I already knew.
I’d be thinking about it a lot.
I already knew I wanted to build something.
Even if it exploded.
Maybe especially if it exploded.
 
The woman turned back to her bench, already elbow-deep in something that was either a self-stirring teapot or a highly confused helmet. I lingered a second longer—just long enough for Glint to sneeze again and shake the butterfly off his head.
Before I left, I grabbed one of the pamphlets sitting in a lopsided stack near the entrance. The front read:
“Tinkering for the Terminally Curious: A Beginner’s Guide to Controlled Chaos.”
Sold.
The paper was already a little singed around the edges. I didn’t mind.
With the pamphlet tucked under one arm, I backtracked across the plaza and made a beeline for the alchemy tent. The goggle-clad woman was mid-rant about “ingredient personality theory” to a terrified-looking recruit, but she spotted me long enough to shout, “You didn’t grow extra limbs! That’s a good start!”
“I’m still counting,” I called back.
I snagged a bright orange scroll from the registration table with “ALCHEMY: LEGAL USES ONLY” stamped across the top in red ink, then disappeared before she could rope me into testing another concoction.
Two pamphlets. Two paths. And maybe—just maybe—a new direction for the part of me that didn’t want to fight or run or hide.
 
I found Calla still near the Enchanter booths, seated cross-legged on a conjured cushion, completely absorbed in a thick-bound tome that was glowing faintly at the seams. Her fingers traced symbols in the air, light dancing behind them, while a small cube-shaped device hovered over one shoulder and occasionally zapped her for incorrect posture.
Honestly? She looked happy.
Focused. In her element.
She noticed me watching and blinked up, startled. Then mouthed: Sorry. Her eyes flicked to the book. Five more minutes?
I smiled and shook my head. “I’ll catch you later,” I said, just loud enough for her to hear.
She relaxed a little, gave me a grateful nod, then turned back to her glyphwork.
I adjusted my bag, slipped the pamphlets inside, and turned toward the city beyond.
I had somewhere else to be.
There was a name still echoing in my head. A man who’d talked about leveling artifacts. Who’d vanished from the public eye. Who everyone thought had lost the plot.
Merden.
People said he was a recluse.
Maybe he was.
But right now?
He might be the only person in the city with answers.