“Ack! I’m being kidnapped!”

  The carriage rattled as Raehel woke up, her red hair untamed and frizzy from a night’s sleep. The first streaks of dawn streamed in the window as they rode past the waking fields of Granavale County. He ducked to dodge a wild flailing fist.

  “Sleep well, Raehel the Magnificent?”

  “No! I did not,” she said, as she realized where she was. “You dragged me out of my quarters before the crack of dawn and told me to join you for a ride out to Granavale Town! This is an outrage!”

  “You said you wanted to come along when I helped arrange things.”

  “You didn’t tell her we’d be traveling so early, did you?” Mary said.

  “I assumed it was self-evident.”

  Mary sighed.

  Raehel sighed. “Nobles, man. Even the nice ones are like this.”

  He winced. Maybe she had a point.

  “So where are we going?”

  “Granavale Town,” Archmund said. “I’ll try to speak to the Church to get their support, since they’re one of the most important civic organizations and one of our close allies. I also want to ask them about souls.”

  “Oh, come on. There’s no way they actually know how souls work—”

  “They’re thousands of years old and they actually do Miracles. They’ve got to be doing something right.”

  “If they didn’t do Miracles, no one would have any reason to believe the tripe they spew.”

  Mary frowned. “I don’t get it. Isn’t doing miracles what the Church does?”

  “You need to read theodicy.”

  Archmund didn’t personally see how investigations of the Problem of Evil, why an all-loving, all-benevolent. all-powerful Goddess would allow Evil to exist, could convince the average commoner of the falsity of Miracles, but he didn’t want to argue the point.

  “Anyways,” Archmund said. “I can wake you once we get to town.”

  “I have a better idea,” Raehel said. She jostled around in her robes until she pulled out a clear spherical Gem.

  It was close to perfectly spherical, like a crystal ball, but quite a bit larger than the ones that he’d collected from Monsters. She handed it to Archmund.

  Archmund frowned, weighing it in a gloved hand. “What’s this?”

  He remembered his idle thoughts about how circles were the mathematical limit of a regular polygons as its number of sides approached infinity, and how that might imply a perfect sphere had unlimited potential. He’d had to adjust that theory a little bit when he got near-spherical but magically inert Gems from Monsters in Granavale Dungeon. He suspected he’d have to adjust it again.

  It didn’t make sense at all if the University of Imperial Mages was just handing perfect spheres out to nobles rich enough to hire a student as a private tutor.

  “This is a Storage Gem,” said Raehel.

  “Meaning?”

  “Pour your power into it. Try to Attune.”

  Archmund did. There was almost no resistance — his power flowed freely into the Gem, yet little flowed back to him, and what did was pure and unaltered. The sphere started glowing a pale blue, but the power didn’t dissipate or fuel an Enchantment — it remained, just at the edge of his consciousness, yet within reach. He understood instantly.

  In the visual language of fantasy video games in his past life, the color blue meant magic. A character’s capacity for magic was often abstracted into a “magic gauge”, a bar or globe that filled up and emptied with blue “magic points” depending on their remaining capacity.

  It was as easy to drain the power from the Storage Gem as it had been to contribute it — another marked difference from his other Gems, which fed power back into him at a natural, almost unnoticeable rate.

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  “You picked that up real quickly.”

  “Is it supposed to be hard?”

  “Incredibly hard, for anyone who uses it as their first Gem,” Raehel said.

  “Because there’s no Enchantment that demands the magic be used. Of course it’ll be hard if that’s the case,” Archmund said.

  “That’s so much more preferable to teaching bad habits and locking fresh mages into Gems they might not have an affinity for.”

  Unfortunately, that made sense.

  “So why’s it a sphere, anyways?” Archmund said. “Other spherical Gems are… inert. Anything that can actually do something is shaped.”

  “Sacred geometry,” said Raehel.

  “What does that even mean?”

  “What is the shape with the highest surface-area-to-volume ratio?”

  The University was apparently an institution that wanted its members to have a strong understanding of mathematics and the natural sciences.

  “A sphere.”

  Raehel nodded. She didn’t elaborate further. He took that as a cue to continue.

  “And each of the… Omnio Solids,” really, he knew them as the Platonic Solids, but if Alexander Omnio I had taken credit for the ideas of Plato, both of them were too dead to bother arguing with, “is associated with one of the elements, which dictates what Enchantments it has. Further flaws can alter the Enchantments.”

  “Naively true, fundamentally incorrect.”

  Raehel started gesticulating wildly with her hands as she explained. “Cut a sphere into a dodecahedron, the shape of Numen, and you lose a minimal amount of mass. Cut that dodecahedron into a tetrahedron, the shape of Fire, and it’d be the same as if you’d cut it from a sphere. But cut a dodecahedron from that tetrahedron, and you lose way too much comparatively. The sphere’s got the most potential. It’s just the geometry of waste.”

  “You make it sound like the shape and the element don’t actually correlate at all.”

  “I’ve seen enough ‘special cases’ of that not to take the correspondence at face value.”

  He nodded absently, mainly because he had no idea whether she was making things up or not, and made to hand the Storage Gem back to her. She leaned back. “Oh no. That one’s yours now. I wouldn’t want any trace magic from that flowing back into me. That’s waaaaay too close for me. Don’t want your soul mingling with mine. It’s yours now. Put it on a necklace or something.”

  He felt Mary’s eyes burning a hole into him. He steadfastly refused to look in her direction.

  The sunrise over the fields was beautiful.

  Soon Granavale Town was visible on the horizon, as they’d passed through the end of the rolling hills.

  “So, how are you going to do this?” Raehel said. “Never been along for one of these before.”

  “We’ve got a few things on the agenda,” Archmund said. “Mary?”

  Mary nodded. She wasn’t one of the literati yet, but her reading ability had jumped in leaps and bounds to the point where he could trust her to make lists and plans.

  “The Church, as Archmund mentioned, is the center of religious life in Granavale County, but it also serves a powerful secular purpose as a center of community,” she said. “Mother Cera has always been a staunch ally and good friend to the Lord Reginald Granavale, so this meeting is to pay her the courtesies she’s due after our long relationship.”

  “I also want to speak to Sister Catherine—”

  “I’m sure you do, young master—”

  “About religious matters,” said Archmund. “She’s not formally inducted, so she’ll be more open to talking about potentially heterodox ideas when it comes to the nature of the soul.”

  “On the hunt for more knowledge?” said Raehel. “I want to come with.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Archmund said. “She’s wary of outsiders.”

  “If you learn anything you think could be useful for your training, let me know so I can add it to your lessons then,” Raehel said reproachfully.

  Archmund nodded, and gestured for Mary to continue.

  “Granavale Manor tries to source many of its meals and household tools from local merchants and craftsmen instead of Imperial supply channels. Over the past centuries, we’ve built strong relationships with those who live on our land, and we would like to check in on the status of their households.”

  The Crylaxan Plague had disrupted things greatly, which made it all the more essential to keep an eye on them. Mary had been a proud member of one of those households, and yet she’d ended up working as a servant in Granavale Manor.

  “I’d also like to see if any of their sons and daughters have changed their life plans,” Archmund said. “Because of the Dungeon.”

  Dungeons had a way of ruining counties in a very simple way. A single piece of Gemgear could turn a regular person into a superhuman hero; it was easy to luck into getting Gemgear through fighting through a Dungeon with a group of your five or so close friends, if you accepted at least one of you would get maimed; the more gear you had, the more you could easily get.

  The risk was alluring, tempting compared to sixty years of farming or blacksmithing and staying in one place. So youth would try to become heroes, and none would learn craft skills, and the thriving infrastructure of a self-sufficient County could get hollowed out in a decade.

  “Well, they’d be stupid to try now,” Raehel said. “You cleared the Dungeon, didn’t you?”

  “Just the Upper Tier.”

  “Still, that’s the safest one. The easiest place to get Gemgear without dying. All of the Gear they could’ve taken is yours, now.”

  It was. And he’d already given a piece of Gemgear to one fanatically devoted servant.

  “My goal is to keep them from leaving and turning my home into a ghost town,” Archmund said. “And to stop that from happening I need to keep it a good place to live.”

  Raehel was smart and capable, but he didn’t trust her not to blab once she wasn’t working for him anymore — and she seemed the type to let things slip on accident. It would be useful to have a private army, but Mercy had all but told him to do it without being obvious. Letting it slip to his hired magic teacher would be a major tactical error, especially since she was a self-proclaimed genius.

  Soon, their journey finally drew to a close in the town center. They stopped in front of the Church. A young woman in a modest gray habit was sweeping the steps, and Archmund sauntered forth.