"How much are the flowers?"
"Oh, hello sir! It–" The vendor looked up from arranging a display of white lilies and paused for a moment, studying Sael's face.
Sael frowned slightly. Not in irritation, just puzzled by the sudden pause.
"Sorry," the man said quickly, seeming to realize he'd been staring. "Thought you were someone I knew for a second there." He gestured to the flowers in Sael's hands. "Half a Sol for the bunch you're holding. One for the mixed bouquet."
The apology was unnecessary, in Sael's opinion. He had no problem with staring. People looked at things they found interesting or confusing—it was natural. But he supposed most people considered prolonged eye contact rude for reasons he'd never quite understood.
Anyway.
Sael nodded and reached for his coin purse, but something made him pause. The man kept giving him those glances throughout their brief interaction. Not suspicious glances, exactly. More like he was trying to solve a puzzle.
But why?
Maybe he had something on his face? Or in his hair? Sael would have stared too if someone had bird droppings on their head and was wandering around oblivious. The polite thing would be to mention it, but then again, maybe the man was too courteous to point out whatever embarrassing thing Sael was apparently displaying.
He'd been in similar situations himself. Even now, he'd been tempted to tell this very vendor that he could regrow his hair if he wanted. The man wasn't bald, exactly—more that he was refusing to concede the battle. He had taken the hair from the back and swept it forward in a valiant attempt at coverage. Unfortunately, a light festival breeze kept lifting the arrangement, revealing a perfectly reflective skull beneath. It made the whole thing more noticeable, not less.
Sael wasn't judging, but he had thought it might offend the man to be reminded of it, so he kept it to himself.
"Excuse me."
The vendor's voice pulled Sael out of his spiraling thoughts. The man was holding out the flowers but hadn't quite let go of them yet.
"Have you..." He was hesitating. Out with it, young man. "Well, this is going to seem like a strange question, but have you been here before? At the festival, I mean. Maybe ten years ago? And... another time, maybe ten years before that? And... and another ten years before that?"
Sael blinked, caught completely off guard.
His mind went blank for a moment as he tried to figure out how to respond. Maybe the man had been a child and had seen him. Maybe he'd been working this same flower stand with his father or grandfather.
The expected and less time consuming explanation would be to say he was half-elven. It was common enough, and it would explain why he looked like a man in his late twenties with silver hair and beard, essentially unchanged over three decades.
Instead, lost in overthinking, the thought at the front of his mind slipped out. "You're bald."
Silence followed. They just… stared at each other.
Sael's face had settled into what he knew was probably his most intimidating expression—brows drawn together, mouth set in a flat line. Not on purpose. It was simply what his face did whenever he said something stupid and his brain scrambled for damage control.
The vendor blinked several times, as if confirming he'd heard correctly.
"I…" Sael cleared his throat. The man looked genuinely hurt, which somehow made the whole thing worse.
Baldness, in his view, shouldn't be something people tiptoed around. It was common, inevitable for many, and hardly shameful. The real problem was that society treated it like a secret, made worse when men tried to hide it by combing longer hair over the bare spots, which only emphasized them.
"That came out wrong."
"Ah," The vendor's voice was carefully neutral.
Sael reached into his travel bag and pulled out a small glass bottle. The liquid inside was a deep purple, almost black in the festival lighting. He held it out toward the man.
"This is a high-grade restoration potion. It's free."
The vendor stared at the bottle like it might bite him.
"I wasn't trying to be rude," Sael continued, still holding the bottle out. "I was thinking about offering this to you earlier, but I thought it might be presumptuous. Then when you asked about the festivals, I got nervous and said the first thing that came to mind, which was apparently the worst possible thing."
"You... carry hair potions around?"
"I'm an alchemist." He was also a master of every other magical disciplines, but saying so now seemed like showing off. And not relevant. So he didn't. Instead, Sael pressed the bottle into the man's palm before he could protest. "Consider it an apology."
He grabbed the flowers from the vendor's other hand and dropped one Sol coin on the counter. "Thank you for the flowers."
The vendor was still staring at the bottle in his hand as Sael turned to leave.
As he kept walking, flowers in hand, a thought came.
I should have mentioned the dosage..
Actually—he turned back toward the stall. The vendor should know. It was important. He could just quickly explain—
But there was already another customer leaning over the counter, gesturing at the hanging herbs.
Sael faced forward again and kept walking.
The vendor would be fine—the potion wouldn't kill him—but if he used the whole thing at once, he'd end up with more hair than he'd probably ever had in his life. Thick, lustrous locks cascading down to his shoulders. Maybe past them. The man would wake up looking like he'd stolen a wig from a very enthusiastic bard.
On the other hand, if he was smart about it—a few drops in his bathwater—it would heal any scars, revigorate his body, fix internal damage he didn't even know he had. Versatile like that, grade-S restoration potions.
So really, Sael had done him a favor.
An awkward, unsolicited favor that started with an insult, but a favor nonetheless.
He took a long pull from his pipe and decided to stop thinking about it.
"Sael!"
He stopped in his tracks.
The voice had come from somewhere behind him, clear and sharp over the festival noise. A woman's voice, calling his name.
Sael turned slowly, flowers still clutched in one hand.
For a moment—just a moment—his mind went somewhere it hadn't gone in a long time. A ghost from the past, maybe. Someone who'd known him before. Someone who remembered.
But that was impossible.
A woman was running toward him. Thirties, maybe. Brown hair tied back in a practical bun. Flour dusted across her apron. She looked harried in the way mothers of young children always looked harried, which is to say, constantly and with great intensity.
Sael had never seen her before in his life.
She wasn't running at him, he realized. She was running past him, chasing something small and fast that had just darted between two stalls.
A child.
A boy, maybe six or seven, wearing an oversized blue coat that dragged on the ground when he ran. A pointed hat—comically large and floppy—sat crooked on his head. He was brandishing a stick like it was a staff, shouting something about fireballs and destiny.
The coat was the wrong shade of blue. The hat was absurd. But the general aesthetic was—
Oh.
The boy was dressed like him.
Or rather, like the paintings of him. The ones that hung in the village hall, depicting "Sael the Great" in dramatic poses that bore only a passing resemblance to anything that had actually happened.
"Sael, you get back here right now!" the woman shouted, still chasing.
The boy ignored her and rejoined a cluster of other children near a fountain, all of them similarly armed with sticks and oversized hats.
"I'll cast Meteor!" the boy announced, waving his stick dramatically. "Just like Sael did at the Battle of Cair Natel!"
"You can't cast Meteor!" another child protested. This one was dressed in what looked like a tablecloth and was holding a wooden sword. "You're out of mana!"
"Am not!"
"Are too! You used it all fighting the troll!"
"I have a mana potion!"
"You drank it already!"
The real Sael watched this exchange with what he suspected was an expression of deep confusion.
The boy in the blue coat stamped his foot. "Fine! Then I'll use Arcane Boulders! And they'll be the strongest boulders ever, because I'm going to be the greatest mage in history, just like Sael The Great was! I'll save kingdoms and defeat dark lords and everyone will know my name!"
The woman finally caught up to him. She grabbed the boy by the back of his coat; muscle memory did the rest.
"What you're going to do," she said firmly, "is come home and finish your vegetables."
"But we're in the middle of a battle!"
"The dark lord can wait."
"Mom—"
"Vegetables first. Then you can save the world."
The other children groaned in solidarity. The boy in the tablecloth looked personally betrayed, like the concept of vegetables was a war crime.
"But I almost had him!" the boy protested, gesturing at his friend with the stick. "One more Arcane Boulder and—"
"Sael."
The woman's voice had dropped into that tone. The one that said the negotiation phase was over.
The boy deflated slightly but didn't give up entirely. "Can I at least finish this battle? Please? Just this one battle, and then I'll eat all the vegetables. Even the carrots."
"Especially the carrots."
"Okay, fine, especially the carrots—"
The boy stopped mid-sentence.
He was looking past his mother now, past the fountain, toward the edge of the village where the road sloped upward into the hills.
His eyes narrowed.
"Mom," he said slowly. "What's that?"
The woman turned, following his gaze. She squinted toward the horizon, hand rising to shade her eyes from the sun.
Her expression changed.
It started as confusion—a slight furrow of her brow, head tilting as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing. Then her eyes widened, just a fraction, and her mouth opened slightly.
"Dragon," she whispered.
Then, much louder:
"DRAGON! THERE'S A DRAGON!"
The words cut through the festival noise like a knife.
Conversations stopped. Heads turned. Someone dropped a plate.
"There's a dragon!" the woman screamed, already grabbing her son and pulling him backward. "Everyone run! Run!"
She didn't wait to see if anyone listened. She scooped the boy into her arms—he was too startled to protest—and sprinted toward the nearest building. The other children scattered like startled birds, their stick-weapons forgotten on the ground.
Sael turned.
The sky was still blue. Still cloudless. Still beautiful.
Except for the small dark shape moving toward them from the east.
It was far away. Maybe three miles out, possibly more. At this distance it looked like a bird. A large bird, certainly, but just a bird.
Huh, the woman has good vision. Sael thought. Probably due to carrots. She seems to like carrots.
That was a joke, of course. She clearly had a perception skill. But he was going to credit the carrots anyway.
Sael watched it for a moment, then took another pull from his pipe.
The dot was getting bigger.
Not quickly, nor dramatically. Just steadily, the way distant things did when they were moving toward you at speed. What had been a speck was now roughly the size of his thumbnail held at arm's length.
Around him, the festival was dissolving into chaos.
Vendors were abandoning their stalls. Parents were grabbing children. Someone was ringing the village bell—three sharp clangs that probably meant something official, that was new. It used to be seven clangs when he lived here.
A man in guard livery ran past, shouting orders that no one was listening to.
Sael watched the chaos unfold with the detached interest of someone observing weather. People were running in every direction—mostly away from the dragon, though a few seemed to have panicked so thoroughly they'd forgotten which direction "away" was.
The blacksmith's stall was at the edge of the square.
Sael walked toward it.
The place was practically empty now. A few stragglers were still fleeing, but most had already found somewhere to hide. The blacksmith himself was hastily throwing tools into a sack, hands shaking badly enough that he dropped a hammer twice.
Sael stopped at the counter.
"Excuse me," he said. "How much for a spear?"
The blacksmith looked up. His face was pale, eyes wide, and there was sweat beading on his forehead despite the mild weather.
He stared at Sael like he was madman.
"A spear," Sael repeated, in case the man hadn't heard. "One of those." He pointed at the weapon rack.
The blacksmith's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
Then, without a word, he turned and ran. Sprinting toward the nearest horse cart like his life depended on it, which, to be fair, it probably did. His sack of tools stayed on the counter, forgotten in his haste.
Sael watched him go.
Normally, he would have found that rude. Being spoken to and not receiving an answer violated basic conversational etiquette. But he understood the situation. A dragon was generally a matter of worry, and the blacksmith had probably decided that profit margins were less important than continued existence.
Fair enough.
Sael reached into his bag and pulled out a handful of coins. He counted out fifteen Sol—more than generous, assuming the price of spears hadn't gone up significantly in the last decade—and placed them on the counter in a neat stack.
Then he walked around the stall and selected a spear from the rack.
A notification appeared in his vision.
ATK +45
Sael glanced at it and scoffed quietly. Forty-five attack points put it at roughly D-grade. Not bad for a normal spear, especially from a blacksmith in a village like Gatsby. It was simple, well-balanced, with a leaf-shaped blade and a sturdy ash shaft. The kind of weapon a professional soldier might carry. Practical and effective.
Sael tested the weight, nodded to himself, and walked back into the village square.
The dragon was still coming.
Still a dot in the sky, but growing steadily larger. With his vision, Sael could make out more details now. The way its wings moved. The shape of its skull. The strange, jerky quality to its flight that didn't quite match how living dragons moved.
His eyes narrowed slightly.
Not a normal dragon.
A necro-dragon.
Dead and reanimated. Then controlled by a necromancer powerful enough to maintain a working on something that size over distance.
"Hmm."
A hmm of inconvenience, that one.
He pulled the flowers from where he'd been holding them and opened his [Inventory]. The screen appeared—a translucent grid of squares—and he deposited the lilies into an empty slot. They vanished with a faint shimmer.
Something moved at the edge of his vision.
Sael looked down.
A small figure stood a few feet in front of him, trembling like a leaf in a storm.
It was the boy from earlier. Still wearing the oversized blue coat and the ridiculous floppy hat. Still clutching his stick in both hands.
Sael blinked.
What was—
He focused, listening past the sound of his own breathing and the distant beat of wings. In the chaos, he could still hear people running. Doors slamming. Shutters closing. And somewhere, not far away, a woman's voice calling desperately.
"Sael! Sael, where are you?!"
The boy must have slipped away in the confusion.
To do what, exactly?
Sael looked at the stick. Then at the boy's stance—feet planted, shoulders squared, chin raised in a way that would have been impressive if the child wasn't visibly shaking.
Oh.
The boy thought he was going to fight the dragon.
Sael squinted slightly, consciously activating the skill [Third Eye] and a small screen appeared above the boy's head.
Level 0
He stared at it for a moment, then smiled.
"That's very brave," he said quietly.
The boy didn't hear him. He was too focused on the dragon, eyes locked on the distant shape, lips moving in what looked like an incantation. Probably something he'd made up. Possibly something he'd heard in a story.
Sael looked at the spear in his hand.
Then at the dragon.
It was close enough now that he could see the tears in its wings—ragged holes where the membrane had rotted away. Close enough to see how its scales had lost their luster, turned dull and gray in death.
Still a mile out, maybe less.
Sael shifted his grip on the spear, feeling the balance point. He channeled mana through his arm, down the shaft, into the blade. The metal began to glow faintly—white-hot at the tip, cooling to orange along the edges.
More mana.
The spell matrix formed in his mind, layers of compression and acceleration weaving together. Aerodynamic shaping. Trajectory correction. Kinetic amplification.
He raised the spear.
The boy raised his stick at the same moment, shouting Arcane Boulder!
Sael threw.
The spear left his hand.
For a fraction of a second, it hung in the air—just a spear, pointed at the sky.
Then the spell activated.
The air cracked.
A thunderclap split the square as the spear punched through the sound barrier. The shockwave knocked over an abandoned cart and shattered three windows.
The boy stumbled backward, hat flying off his head.
Sael watched the spear's flight.
It moved too fast to follow with normal vision—a streak of white light, trailing superheated air and a sound like continuous thunder. Distance collapsed. The spear crossed half a mile in less than a second, then the final quarter-mile even faster as the acceleration spell compounded.
The dragon didn't have time to react. The spear hit it dead center in the chest, and for a moment, nothing happened.
Then the delayed detonation triggered.
The sky turned white with an explosion blooming outward in a perfect sphere, bright enough to leave afterimages, loud enough to rattle shutters a mile away. The shockwave rolled over Gatsby in a wall of displaced air that bent trees and scattered roof tiles.
When the light faded, there was nothing left of the dragon.
No falling corpse. No scattered bones.
Just ash, drifting down like black snow.
Sael cast a single spell.
"[Invisibility]."
The spell settled over him like a second skin, bending light, muffling sound. He took a step backward, then another, until he was well clear of the boy.
The boy was still standing where he'd been, stick raised, eyes squeezed shut.
Slowly, he opened them.
He looked at his stick. Looked at the sky, where the dragon had been. Looked at the fading light of the explosion, still bright against the horizon.
His mouth fell open.
"I—" he started. Stopped. Started again. "I did it?"
He turned in a slow circle, searching for witnesses, for someone who'd seen what he'd done—what he thought he'd done.
The square was empty.
"I did it!" he shouted, louder now, voice cracking with excitement and disbelief. "Did anyone see that?! I killed a dragon! A dragon! I—"
After a while, more people and his mother burst out of a nearby house, her face was streaked with tears as she tackled him in a hug that nearly knocked him over.
Sael watched from his invisible vantage point as the woman sobbed into her son's shoulder, as other villagers began to emerge cautiously from their hiding places, as the boy tried to explain between his mother's frantic questions that he'd slain a dragon and could he please skip vegetables now because he was pretty sure that counted as a heroic deed.
Sael took one last look at the scene, then turned and walked away.
He had a grave to visit.