Chapter 7: Sunstile

As Ryland kept moving, Viren caught up with him before long. His flabbergasted state wasn’t enough to make him fall behind for too long. He was staying silent, though. Good boy.

It was Ryland’s turn to ask a question, after all.

“How exactly were you planning to head back to the academy, Viren?” Ryland asked. “Once you left the dungeon?”

“I was thinking of taking the train, sir,” Viren answered as he got abreast of Ryland. “In case anyone from the academy or any of the club members was coming back, I’d have a decent chance of meeting them on the way.”

Ryland nodded. That was smart. For all that Viren had appeared hasty and impulsive with some of his decisions so far, he still had a good head on his shoulders. “Excellent. We shall take the train, then.”

“You don’t need to go to the bank for that, sir.” Viren walked a little straighter, clearly trying to project some confidence. “I’ve got enough for tickets. For us both!”

“Is that right?” Ryland squinted at the town’s gates. They were surprisingly open. “First-class?”

“Uh…”

Ryland chuckled. “Come on, don’t tarry.”

“So you’re coming to the academy too, sir?” Viren lowered his voice. “Your Glyph of Questing was pointing to the academy, wasn’t it?”

“Indeed. Thus, our destinations are aligned, Viren.”

The tremors Ryland had felt earlier intensified. So much so that even Viren paused as he and the land they stood on all shook.

“Is that…?” Viren’s words faded as a small cloud of dust rose in the distance.

“The dungeon, yes,” Ryland said. “I believe it has finished collapsing. More or less. I wonder if the townsfolk will notice.”

To his slight surprise, Ryland didn’t find anyone getting worked up about it or anything. There were no urgent horns or klaxons blaring in the distance, nor were the town’s gates being drawn closed, not even an extra patrol or anything heading out.

Hmm. Had people grown more complacent nowadays? Had Living Mana stopped being the sort of all-consuming threat it had been during his time on Vyrd?

That seemed unlikely. While Ryland hadn’t been on Vyrd specifically for a long while, he hadn’t stayed put in one corner of the Realms. He had kept moving, continued travelling, and had seen and learned a great deal of things. One of which was the fact that Living Mana was even more resurgent nowadays than it had been when it had first arisen.

Which suggested Sunstile’s reaction—or the lack of it, rather—was a one-off thing. Likely a result of local incompetence instead of a widespread cultural malaise.

Or Ryland was judging too quickly and too harshly when it hadn’t even been that long.

But the security was strange. Ryland and Viren weren’t stopped, and the gates remained open, but his senses tingled. They were noted. Observed. Possibly surveyed by some hidden Inscriptions that judged whether they presented a threat like Living Mana. Ryland remembered to lower the inherent magic of his body so as not to trigger a terrific slew of alarms.

He noted there were a few guards keeping an eye on things from the lookout tower next to the gate. One of them was staring in the direction of the collapsed dungeon.

Ah, so they had noted it. They were simply taking their time to respond.

That said, he did sense the old, old Inscriptions still active around the perimeter of the town. Those were the ones set down by the ancient mages to keep Sunstile safe against everything from invasions from other Realms to, more recently, Incursions by Living Mana.

One of those old Inscriptions sent a tendril of magic that froze upon contact with Ryland’s manasoul. Then it tried digging deeper.

Apparently, it had found him interesting.

“Sir,” Viren said quietly. He had come to a stop, frowning as magic intensified around them. “I feel like… a lab rat.”

Hmm. Well, they couldn’t have that.

For all the inherent magic within himself that Ryland had suppressed, he allowed one Inscribed Glyph to surge back to its old form. His Glyph of Unbound.

The magical tendril brushed against the Glyph and promptly recoiled.

Viren blinked. “It’s… gone?”

“Indeed,” Ryland said with a small smile. “Come on.”

Ryland put it out of his mind as he and Viren resumed walking. That incident might send a warning or an alarm through the old security enchantments that Sunstile had smartly retained through the centuries. He wasn’t too fussed about it, though. Brushing up against such things happened more often than not for him.

Soon enough, they entered the town proper. He was, in a word, minorly enthralled. Hmm. That had been two words. Regardless, Ryland found himself staring at how different the town was from what he remembered.

As Ryland walked, he remembered that little promise to himself about breathing in deep. So he did. A nice, long inhale to brush up on what the air of Vyrd tasted like. So sentimentally satisfying.

It wasn’t just the air, of course. There was so much more of the atmosphere to take in.

Ryland had only been to Sunstile very briefly in his youth, but his faint impressions of the place didn’t clash with what he saw now.

The architecture hadn’t changed over the centuries so much as it had evolved. People had ensured their homes and offices retained familiar shapes, and had simply upgraded the wooden walls to bricks, made the windows larger, and so on.

In the same vein, the streets were wider and better paved. Every road was lined with streetlamps. And, most wondrously, there were vehicles. Actual Inscribed carriages trundled between the buildings of Sunstile. Few and far between, sure, but their presence spoke volumes about how society had advanced in Ryland’s absence.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It wasn’t just those either. He didn’t recognize the fashion at all. The clothes looked so entirely foreign, he might as well have been on another Realm. Multiple times, Ryland smelled food that he couldn’t even begin to identify. There was so much on offer for purchase. Books, watches, wine, weapons…

And this was all in just a border town.

In a way, it was nice to see how things had advanced. And it started to make sense why there wasn’t too much going on at the gates. Things had obviously… relaxed.

For better or for worse? Ryland supposed he’d find out eventually. Considering they seemed to be doing fine—and that this sort of change happened across generations rather than overnight—suggested that things were far more stable now than during the war-torn times he had been here last.

“I think we took a wrong turn, sir,” Viren said beside him. He sniffed the fragrant air. “This district is too… flowery.”

He was right. There were far too many flower shops all around them. Ryland wasn’t using his Glyph of Questing anymore, opting to rely on his rather old memories of the town. Memories that had aged poorly since it seemed whole districts had shifted purposes.

“It seems you’re right,” Ryland said. “Let’s try another direction.”

“Sir, I thought you knew the way.”

“I thought I knew the way too!”

“Well… I know the way.”

“You do? Well, I didn’t know you knew the way.”

“Right…” Viren was giving him that odd look again, like Ryland was growing a fish out of his head or something. “Um, should I lead the way? Mind you, I know the way to one bank. Not sure if that’s the one you want or where the others are.”