Elaric (he still answered to Elaric, no matter how many times the world tried to rename him "boy" or "gutter-rat") licked the last flakes of honey from his fingers as he crossed the crooked lanes that spiraled down from Baker Street toward the fish wharves. The apple tart had been pure sin: flaky pastry shattering against his teeth, tart fruit bursting warm across his tongue, butter pooling in the hollows of the crust. He forced himself to slow down, to savor. He wrapped the two remaining currant cookies and the second honey bun in the napkin and tucked them deep into the inner pocket of his coat, right against his heart. A small, ridiculous part of him wanted them close, the way a child clutches a favored toy. They smelled like Maris's kindness, and he wasn't ready to let that go yet.
The afternoon had turned thick and golden, the kind of late-summer heat that made clothing stick and tempers short. He took a shortcut through Smuggler's Cut, a narrow alley that slanted between leaning warehouses and the back walls of dye-works. The air here was cooler, damp with the breath of the river somewhere below. Laundry lines crisscrossed overhead like festive banners, dripping on his shoulders whenever the breeze shifted.
Halfway down the Cut, a low, rhythmic sound reached him: a wet, fleshy slap-slap-slap, steady as a drumbeat, underscored by a woman's breathy grunt each time it landed.
Curiosity (stupid, boyish curiosity) tugged him sideways. A stack of broken crates formed a shadowed nook beside a boarded-up door. Elaric edged closer and peered through a gap no wider than his fist.
He saw them immediately.
A broad-shouldered man in a half-unlaced leather jerkin had a woman pinned against the rough brick. Her skirts (cheap green wool) were rucked up to her waist, bunched in the man's fist like reins. Pale thighs trembled each time he drove forward. The woman was bent at the hips, palms flat against the wall, back arched so sharply that the line of her spine showed through the thin fabric of her blouse. Every thrust rocked her onto the balls of her feet; the worn soles of her shoes scraped softly against the cobbles.
The man's cock was thick, flushed dark, shining with her slick as it pistoned in and out. Each deep stroke ended with his hips smacking loudly against the plush curve of her ass, the flesh there already red from earlier impacts. A faint sheen of sweat coated both of them; droplets rolled down the woman's thigh and caught the stray shaft of light that slipped between the crates.
Elaric couldn't breathe. He had never seen two people coupled before, not like this: raw, animal, unashamed. The man's head was thrown back, eyes slitted in pleasure, lips parted around guttural sounds that weren't quite words. One of his hands left her hip to fist in her lank auburn hair, pulling just hard enough to arch her neck. The woman let out a thin, reedy moan (not of ecstasy, Elaric realized dimly, but of endurance). Her face, when it turned toward the light, was blank, bored even, lips pressed into a flat line. Professional. A transaction measured in minutes and copper.
The man's rhythm faltered for a heartbeat. His head snapped toward the crates.
"Did you hear something?" he growled, voice gravelly with lust.
The woman sighed through her nose. "Thirty minutes left on the hour, love. Focus."
Elaric's heart slammed against his ribs like a caged thing. Panic flooded him, icy and absolute. He stumbled backward, boot heel catching on a loose cobble. The crates rattled.
He ran.
He didn't stop until the alley spat him out onto the main wharf road, lungs burning, pulse roaring in his ears. Only then did he dare slow, bending over with hands on knees, gulping air that tasted of brine and sun-baked tar.
His face felt scorched. The image was burned behind his eyelids: the wet gleam of joined flesh, the slap of skin on skin, the woman's indifferent eyes. Heat pooled low in his belly, shameful and undeniable. He fumbled for the napkin bundle, tore off a corner of honey bun, and shoved it into his mouth just to have something else to focus on. The sweetness burst across his tongue, grounding him.
"Gods," he whispered to no one, wiping crumbs from his lip with the back of a trembling hand. "Get a grip, Elaric."
The gulls wheeled overhead, screaming laughter at the flushed, shaken boy clutching pastries like a shield.
He straightened, drew one steadying breath, and kept walking toward the Blue Stair and the Guild beyond it. The taste of honey lingered, cloying now, mixed with the phantom salt of skin he hadn't touched and never would.
He tucked the rest of the sweets deeper into his pocket, right over the frantic drum of his heart, and tried very hard not to think about the wet sounds echoing in the alley behind him
The High District of Caladport
The Blue Stair climbed in seven long switchbacks from the reeking docks to the crown of the city, and when Elaric finally crested the last step, the High District unfolded before him like a dream carved from marble and gold.
Here the air itself felt expensive: cool, perfumed with night-blooming jasmine from hanging gardens, laced with the faint ozone of spell-work instead of fish-guts and tar. Streets were broad and paved with pale limestone that glowed softly under floating witch-lanterns the color of moonlit pearls. Fountains sang in every plaza, water sculpted by invisible hands into leaping dolphins, rearing stags, and lovers locked in eternal embrace. Carriages rolled past on whisper-quiet wheels, lacquered in crimson and indigo, drawn by horses whose manes had been enchanted to ripple like liquid silver. Nobles in silk and spider-lace strolled arm-in-arm with cloaked mages whose staves trailed sparks of violet fire. Even the beggars here wore clean velvet and played lutes.
Elaric stood at the edge of it all in his patched coat and cracked boots, mouth hanging open like the village idiot he absolutely was. A country boy from the barley fields of Three-Rivers Parish, he had once thought the market fair at Highsummer was grand. This was a different order of creation.
No one looked at him. Not once.
A duchess in emerald satin swept by, laughing behind a painted fan; her eyes slid across Elaric as if he were a lamppost. Two elven merchants arguing over the price of phoenix feathers stepped around him without breaking stride. A knight in mirror-bright plate clanked past, trailing the scent of oiled steel and rose attar, and never slowed. In the High District, time was measured in gold, and no one wasted a heartbeat on yet another gawking youth with road dust on his cuffs.
The Guildhall
Then he saw it.
Across the circular plaza called Starfall Court rose the Caladport Branch of the Adventurer's Guild.
Seven stories of night-black granite veined with living gold climbed into the sky, each floor edged by balconies where banners of crimson and silver snapped in the wind. Colossal statues flanked the grand staircase: a dragon coiled around a sword on the left, a phoenix spreading wings of real fire on the right. The great doors (thirty feet tall if they were an inch) were carved from a single slab of heart-oak bound in star-iron, and they stood open tonight, spilling warm torchlight and the low thunder of a thousand voices onto the marble plaza.
Magical runes crawled across every surface like liquid starlight, pulsing gently with each heartbeat of the wards that protected the building. Overhead, the guild's sigil (a stylized compass rose wreathed in laurel) floated in mid-air, thirty feet across, rotating slowly and showering the square below with drifting motes of silver that dissolved before they touched the ground.
Elaric froze.
His boots might as well have been rooted to the stone. Breath caught in his throat; the half-eaten honey bun slipped from his fingers and bounced away unnoticed. His eyes (wide, hazel, still carrying the dust of country roads) reflected the crawling runes like twin mirrors. He looked small, suddenly. A moth fluttering too close to a bonfire.
Minutes passed. Maybe ten. A cool night breeze tugged at his ragged coat, but he didn't feel it.
The Crowd of Youth
Eventually a rough chuckle beside him snapped the spell.
"First time seeing the branch, eh? Don't worry, we all did the statue thing."
Elaric blinked. A lanky boy with sun-bleached hair and a farmer's tan stood grinning at him, arms folded. Behind him clustered a loose knot of twenty-somethings just like Elaric: patched clothes, hungry eyes, cheap boots, clutching crumpled papers or small burlap packs. Some had the raw knuckles of dock workers, others the ink stains of failed scribes, a few carried the lingering scent of hay and livestock.
"Took me a full bell just to close my mouth," a dark-skinned girl with a braid down to her waist laughed, nudging the blond boy. "I'm Kalia. This idiot is Brenn. You got a name, statue-boy?"
"E-Elaric. Elaric Voss." His voice cracked like a twelve-year-old's. Heat flooded his cheeks.
Brenn clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to stagger him. "Welcome to the nightly pilgrimage, Elaric Voss. Every night after sunset they open the doors for new registrations. We're all broke, all starving, and all about to sell our souls for a brass tag and three square meals."
Another boy (freckled, missing two front teeth) whistled low. "Seven hells, look at those wards. My cousin in the capital says the headquarters in Aetherion makes this place look like a village shrine. Supposedly the roof is actual cloudstone. Floats."
"Cloudstone's a myth," Kalia shot back, rolling her eyes. But she was grinning. "Still… imagine the quests posted in there. Dragon-slaying. Sunken treasure. Kissing princesses for reward money."
The group dissolved into laughter, shoving each other, voices overlapping in eager, nervous excitement.
"I heard if you rank Bronze in your first year they give you a room upstairs with an actual mattress."
"I heard the cafeteria serves roast beef every day and the ale's free."
"I heard the receptionist on the third floor is a succubus who—"
"Oi, keep dreaming, toothless."
They were loud, alive, vibrating with the same desperate hope that thrummed in Elaric's own chest. Shoulders brushed shoulders; someone passed around a dented flask that smelled of potato spirits. A girl with a scar across her lip offered Elaric a pull; he took it, coughed, and came up laughing with the rest of them.
The Passers-by
Adventurers returning from missions strode through the plaza without breaking stride: a towering minotaur in rune-etched plate, horns polished to mirrors; a pair of fox-eared beastkin twins wearing matching crimson cloaks and wicked smiles; an elegant high elf in azure robes whose staff left frost flowers blooming on the stones behind her. None of them spared the cluster of wide-eyed youths more than a flicker of amusement or nostalgia.
A noblewoman in a gown of liquid starlight stepped down from her carriage, lifted her skirts daintily over a puddle that reflected the guild's floating sigil, and glided up the grand staircase as if the crowd of hopeful orphans were merely another decoration.
To the powerful, they were scenery. Tomorrow a few of these ragged kids might be heroes. Tonight they were just another crop of dreamers lining up at the gates of possibility.
Elaric drew a shaking breath, tasting night air and distant magic on his tongue. His heart hammered so hard he felt it in his teeth.
Somewhere inside those doors was a brass tag with his name on it. A beginning.
He squared his narrow shoulders, wiped suddenly sweaty palms on his coat, and fell into the laughing, shoving line with the rest of the night's hopeful moths.
The Guild doors yawned wide, warm light spilling out like an invitation written in gold.
Elaric Voss stepped forward, and the city's future stepped with him.