The base of the city was more crowded than Lymur expected.
A wide stone plaza was beneath the floating platform, built around a tall archway of carved stone, and gathered around it was a loose, shuffling line of people. There were merchants with loaded carts, travelers like him on foot, a few fancy carriages toward the back, and guards stationed at the archway.
Every person who passed through stopped for a moment — paper or token in hand, guard inspection — and then stepped onto a gate of siwrling light built into an arch. Lymur noticed, quite sharply, the exact behavior of strange atmospheric particles (which he thought were probably magical particles) each time, and then the person or carriage was gone.
Lymur watched this happen three times.
Teleportation, he thought. Right.
He checked his pockets.
Nothing.
No token, no identification, no small metal plate like the one the merchant ahead of him had just presented to the guard.
He checked again in case he'd missed something.
Still nothing.
He pulled the horse out of the line and to the side, and stayed there thinking. He was pretty sure there was a solution and that he just needed a moment to find it.
He was mid-thought when something hit his hand while he was scratching his head. It was fast, flat, and circular, and it bounced off his palm and stopped, hovering in the air a few centimeters away from him, perfectly still.
Lymur looked at it. It was a wooden disc. He hadn't caught it so much as it had simply... stopped, suspended in the air. He looked at his own hand, then back at the disc, then at his hand again.
"What's this supposed to be?"
Running footsteps approached from the grass beside the road.
"Sorry! Sorry, we didn't mean to throw it that far — " Three children skidded to a stop a few meters away, slightly out of breath, and then went completely still when they saw the disc floating in the air between them and this stranger on the horse.
All three of them stared at it.
Then at him.
Then back at it.
"Mister," one of them said slowly, "are you a mage?"
Lymur looked at the disc. He looked at the children. He looked at the disc again. Then his face relaxed.
"Why, of course I am!" he said, with complete confidence.
The children gasped. "I told you!" the tallest one shouted at the others. "I said he looked like a mage!"
Lymur flicked two fingers and the disc drifted in a gentle arc back toward them. The smallest one grabbed it out of the air with both hands and immediately showed it to the others like it was evidence of something.
"You didn't even move!" one of them said. "You didn't even touch it!"
"Are you going to the academy?!" another asked.
Lymur considered the question for about half a second. "Sure," he said.
They actually cheered, with the full-body commitment only children were capable of, and then all started talking at once about something he mostly didn't follow, and then they were off across the grass again tossing the disc between them, one of them yelling "good luck, mister mage!" over his shoulder without looking back.
Lymur watched them go.
Then he looked at his hand again, slowly, like it might explain itself if he gave it long enough. Something had happened there that wasn't quite Incision and wasn't anything else he'd already identified. He turned his attention inward, reaching for whatever was sitting in the back of his mind — and there really was something new there. Lymur decided to call such things Intrinsic Skills.
There were three of them, and he took note of a particular one.
Ruler's Authority.
...
Ruler's Authority
Lymur read it twice.
"...Oh," he said quietly. "Oh, that sounds good."
He looked at the crowded gate, the guards, the line of travelers. Too many people, too many eyes. He needed somewhere with space to actually think.
He turned the horse off the road.
A short walk from the gate, the road curved past a patch of open woodland. Just a spread of trees and tall grass and a clearing wide enough to work in. Lymur tied the horse to a low branch, told it he'd be back shortly, and stepped into the clearing.
He rolled his sleeves up slightly, for no practical reason, and focused.
The skill responded immediately. Something extended outward from him; an invisible pressure that wrapped around the space around him without touching anything.
He pointed at a fallen stick on the ground near his feet.
"Uh, up."
The stick lifted up. Slowly, smoothly, with no fuss, rising from the grass and hanging in the air at exactly the height he'd indicated.
Lymur stared at it.
"No way..."
He raised his hand. The stick went higher. He lowered it. The stick came down. He moved his hand to the left. The stick moved left. He swept his arm in a wide arc. The stick followed like it was attached to him by something he couldn't see.
"Hahahaha~!"
He started laughing. He hadn't meant to, but he did anyway, and he didn't bother stopping it.
He tried a rock next. It rose up without any more effort than the stick. Then another rock, then three at once, then five, all of them lifting and hanging in the air around him while he moved them in slow circles. The feeling of it was extraordinarily euphoric — the sensation of the world just agreeing with him, mass and position and gravity all stepping aside because he asked them to.
He pushed even further. A fallen log at the edge of the clearing, considerably heavier than any of the rocks. He reached toward it with the Authority and felt the weight of it — substantial, resistant — and then the log shuddered, rolled slightly, and came up off the ground in a slow, steady rise until it was hanging in the air at chest height.
"Okay," Lymur said, grinning at it. "Okay, this is — hell yeah~!"
He set it back down and looked at a young tree at the edge of the clearing. He pointed at it somewhat skeptically and pushed.
The ground cracked. Roots tore free from the soil with a sound like tearing cloth. The entire tree rose several meters into the air, leaves shaking violently, dirt raining from the roots.
Lymur looked at the airborne tree for a long moment.
"I... uprooted a tree," he said, to no one.
He set it down and examined the skill over in his mind. Objects, space, mass. The Authority didn't seem to have opinions about what qualified. It just responded.
Then a brilliant thought occurred to him.
He looked down at himself.
He pointed at his own chest.
"...Up."
For a second nothing happened. Then his feet left the ground.
Lymur froze, hovering about thirty centimeters in the air, and went very still like he was afraid that moving would break something.
Then he went up another meter, deliberately, and his face broke into the widest grin he'd managed since waking up in the forest.
"Ha! This is amazign!"
He went up faster. The trees became smaller, then the clearing, then the road, then the stone plaza and the gate and the line of travelers, all of it became smaller as he happily shot upward through the morning air like he had just discovered the single best thing in the world and intended to use it until further notice.
Wind continued to roar past his face. The city was getting closer now, but he shot up past it, past the city's tallest beuilding, continued above the clouds and then—
"This... is freedom."
— he was just in the sky. Blue in every direction and the world spread out below him like an enormous map of itself. The floating city itself seemed like a kilometer away from where he currently was.
"Ahahahahahahaha~!"
Lymur spread his arms out wide and laughed. It came from somewhere real, that laugh — something that had been tight in his chest all morning just let go, and he stayed there in the sky with the wind in his face and thought, with complete sincerity, that whatever this world was, it was an excellent one.
He darted through a cloud and came out the other side trailing mist. He rolled over and looked down at the ground far below. He went higher just to see if he could, and he really could, and the sky above didn't seem to have an opinion about how far he went. He stayed up there for a while, not going anywhere specific, just moving because he could, banking through the air currents like his body was learning a new language in real time.
Eventually Xyrus came back into his field of view, and he slowed.
"Though I should probably get going."
Right.
Getting inside. That was the original goal.
He circled wide above the city, staying high, and looked for what he needed. He found a gap near the outer wall where the air and magical currents were thin enough and descended through it slowly, carefully, watching for any reaction.
None came.
His feet touched stone on a quiet rooftop near the wall with a soft thud that nobody heard. He looked around. No guards, no windows facing his direction, nothing but the sound of the city below.
"Okay, perfect," he said, with some satisfaction.
He brushed his hands on his trousers out of habit, walked to the edge of the roof, and looked down.
Xyrus City. It was big enough that from where Lymur was standing, he couldn't see the other edge without using Mobius. The city itself had wide stone roads between buildings, a market district somewhere to his left, students in matching uniforms crossing an open courtyard, a pair of mages practicing something with their hands in the middle of a plaza while a small crowd watched. The whole place had the vibe of a place that was always moving, always in the middle of something, never quite the same twice.
Lymur looked at it for a moment with his hands in his pockets.
"So this is a city," he said. He had no memory of other cities to compare it to, but something told him that floating cities were probably not common things.
He found some stairs, descended to street level, and walked into it.
◢◣◢◣◢◣
Two days passed since he first set foot in Xyrus.
Lymur was sitting at the edge of a stone fountain in one of Xyrus's busier squares, elbows on his knees, watching the water ripple. People moved around him, with some occasionally staring at his face, and the noise of the city flowed around him like something he'd already gotten used to, which was its own kind of strange given that he'd only been here two days.
He wasn't paying much attention to any of it.
He was thinking.
"Alright," he muttered to himself. "Let's go over it again."
First — his skills.
That part was still the strangest thing to sit with because of how completely he already understood them. Most people in this world, from what he'd gathered in the library, spent years figuring out what they were capable of. Trial and error, training, gradual discovery. Lymur had woken up in a forest with no memories and within the first few days had near-complete knowledge of everything he could do — and not just the names to add to that, but the functions, the limits, and how they interacted with each other.
It was like remembering something he'd never actually learned.
He had three intrinsic skills. Ruler's Authority, which he'd already had plenty of fun with. Ruler's Ambition, which he hadn't explored much yet — it felt different from Authority, less about the world and more about people, and something told him to be careful with it. And Invariant, which was passive and worked quietly in the background, apparently maintaining something about his cognitive condition.
Then moving on, the unique skills. There were two of them.
Mobius, with four subskills — Theosophy, Calculation Domain, Incision, and True Sphere. The first two had immediately become his most-used tools, working together in a way that was almost embarrassingly convenient. Theosophy broke things down while Calculation Domain organized and interpreted whatever came in, faster than conscious thought. Together they made understanding things almost involuntary. He'd timed himself with a book in the library once. He picked a book with a thousand pages of dense historical text, and it was fully absorbed and understood in under a minute.
He'd sat there afterward feeling somewhat guilty about it.
True Sphere was what he hadn't touched. Something in his instincts went quiet and firm whenever he thought about using it — a deep not here, not near people that he'd decided to respect than not.
The second unique skill was Collapse, which had two subskills. Void Space was useful in theory — a pocket dimension outside of time, extremely good for storage — though he hadn't had occasion to use it yet. Confluence he'd looked at exactly once and knew that even the name sounded like it ended badly for whatever was nearby, and moved on.
He also had a cluster of resistance skills somewhere in the background that he hadn't bothered looking into because they seemed self-explanatory and not immediately relevant.
So that's the skills, he thought. Absurdly complete. Fine.
The second major thing he realized during the past two days was weirder.
He'd nearly panicked on his first afternoon in the city. Why? Because of money, specifically the total absence of it in his pockets. He'd landed on a rooftop with nothing in his name and no idea how this world's economy worked, and as the hours went by and he wandered the streets eating nothing and buying nothing, a dread had started building in the back of his head.
I'm going to starve, he'd thought. I don't know how to make money here. I'm going to die in a floating city because I can't afford bread! This can't be how I die!
He'd found a corner of the public library and sat down to distract himself and wait for a plan to arrive.
And then, somewhere around the second hour, he'd realized he wasn't hungry.
He checked. He focused on his body the same way he'd been learning to focus on his skills, and there was nothing there that resembled need. No thirst either. No tiredness, now that he thought about it — he'd been going since he woke up in the forest and his body felt exactly the same as it had that morning. He could sleep if he wanted to. He'd slept fine that night at the campfire with the Twin Horns peeps, but his body didn't seem to be waiting for it or building toward requiring it.
He was flesh and blood. Clearly. But he wasn't, it turned out, bound by them.
Good news, he'd thought, sitting in the library with a book open in front of him. I can't starve to death.
The less good news was that he still wanted food. Wanted it badly, too. And wanting food with no money and no immediate way to get any was its own kind of miserable, even if the stakes were lower than he'd thought.
So he'd stayed in the library and read instead, which had at least been educational. Theosophy and Calculation Domain made it almost automatic, absorbing and understanding without effort. By the end of the first day he had a working knowledge of the continent, its politics, the adventuring system, how mana cores worked, the basics of the academy system, the rough shape of the magic that governed most things here in Dicathen and its three kingdoms. A world with its own long history that he now understood in general terms without having lived any of it.
Which was useful. It was genuinely useful.
It was also, if he was being honest, making him a little crazy.
Now, back to the present. Second day of his Xyrus City life, and he was feeling miserable.
He groaned quietly and looked at the water.
Everything was so easy. Understanding things was easy. Fighting was easy. And somehow all of that ease had compressed his first two-three days in a new world into something that felt like it should have taken months and hadn't, and now he was sitting at a fountain at what he estimated was mid-morning with no particular problems and nothing especially urgent to do, and he was bored.
Why is everything so easy, he thought, not really as a complaint, more as a genuine question directed at no one.
Ironically, the easiness of life made life harder for dear Lymur.
"Excuse me, young man?"
He looked up.
An elderly grandma stood beside the fountain, her grey hair pinned up loosely, with several grocery bags hanging from both arms. She was smiling at him with patience in her kind-looking blue eyes.
"My back isn't what it used to be," she said. "Just had surgery last month, actually. Would you mind helping me carry these home?"
Lymur looked at the bags. Looked at her. Stood up immediately. "Yeah, sure. No problem at all."
He took the bags from her arms — relatively heavy, actually, more than you'd expect — and fell into step beside her as she turned toward a side street. And as they walked, something happened in his chest that he didn't have an immediate term for. There was... warmth. A soft and settling warmt that spread outward from somewhere central.
He noticed it and slowed internally.
Warm feeling in the chest.
He'd read about this. He was fairly sure he'd read about this. Warmth in the chest, increased heart rate, a general sense of — he checked — yes, his heart was beating a little faster than it had been a minute ago.
He looked at the old woman walking beside him.
Oh no.
His brain arrived at the first conclusion it could find, which was the one he'd encountered most recently in the books he'd been reading, which meant it was romance, which meant — he was in love with an elderly woman he'd met forty seconds ago, which was — that couldn't be right, that was an insane conclusion, but the evidence was — warm chest, faster heartbeat, a strong desire to stay near this person and be helpful to them, which were all things the books had described as —
"Is something wrong, dear?"
Lymur realized he'd been staring, and sweating.
Wait, I can sweat!?
"A-Ah? Hahahaha, nothing," he said immediately, and then looked straight ahead at the road and spent about thirty seconds walking in silence while he rapidly reconsidered everything.
Okay, he thought. Okay. That's not romance. That's obviously not romance. What is that actually.
He thought about it properly this time, without jumping to the first available answer. The feeling had started when she asked him for help. Not before. It was tied specifically to being asked, being needed for something, and having a clear and simple way to be useful to someone who actually needed it.
He turned that over and felt the warmth in his chest confirm it.
Oh, he thought, more quietly. That's what that is.
He relaxed. Smiled a little, to himself, at nothing in particular — satisfied that he debunked himself being in love with an old lady.
They walked and she talked. Her topics were mostly about the city, about the surgery, about her daughter who visited on weekends and her opinion on the quality of produce in the market nearest her home versus the one two streets further. Lymur listened without interrupting much. He asked one question about the surgery that she answered in satisfying detail. She asked him where he was from and he said far away and she accepted that fairly easily.
When they reached her house — small, neat, well-kept, with a window box that had obviously been tended carefully — she turned and reached into her coat pocket.
"Thank you, dear." She held out a folded amount of coin.
Lymur looked at it, then back at the lady.
He wanted money. He needed money. He had been quietly aware of needing money for two full days with no solution in sight, and here was money, being handed to him directly. And yet—
He hesitated. Taking money for such a small thing didn't feel right, even if Lymur didn't know exactly why he felt like so.
"You don't have to," he said.
She gave him a look. She had raised children and, apparently, was not particularly moved by reluctance.
"Nonsense."
Then her eyes moved over him — mostly his clothes which was still travel-worn.
"You should take better care of yourself. Someone as handsome as you shouldn't be walking around looking like this."
Looking like this? Like what exactly.
But the lady's words landed somewhere unexpected. He wasn't sure why. He'd heard plenty of words in the last two days and most of them had passed through without catching on anything, but these ones — like the fact that she'd noticed and cared enough to say something — stuck.
He smiled slowly.
What a good lady, he thought.
"No takebacks, okay? I'll be taking it then," he said, and meant it more than the words probably conveyed. He accepted the money and she told him her name was Lara, and he told her his was Lymur, and she told him to eat something, and then she went inside.
He stayed on the street for a moment after the door closed.
Then he looked down at the coins in his hand and started walking.
He found a clothing shop without too much trouble and was halfway to the counter before he opened his hand properly and actually counted what Lara had given him. He stopped in the middle of the shop floor.
"Isn't this a little too much?"
It was considerably more than what carrying someone's groceries should reasonably cost.
He stood there for a second. You're a genuinely good person, Lara, he thought, with feeling, and made an internal promise to remember that.
He found the shop's small bathroom first and spent a few minutes at the sink washing his face properly, working through his hair until it lay right. There was relief of being clean after days of accumulated road dust and forest mud. When he looked up at the mirror afterward, he blinked once.
He knew in a general way that he was good-looking. It wasn't vanity so much as awareness — people had been glancing at him since he walked into the city, and he'd noticed. But that had been while he was dirty and wearing worn-out traveling clothes, so he'd filed it away without thinking too much about it.
Looking at his reflection now, clean, in actual light — he understood the glances better. His face was striking. The structure of it was sharp but the overall effect was softe. Pale skin and deep red eyes and something about the proportions that the eye kept wanting to return to. He looked at himself for a moment with the same curiosity he applied to most things, concluded that this was just what his face was, and went to find clothes.
"I can't help but think my face looks familiar on someone else... but on who?"
He decided to cast away the thought for now and exited the bathroom. He bought cargo pants with good pockets, a zip-up jacket in a dark color, and decent shoes, and changed into them in the fitting room. He folded the old clothes, looked at them for a second, and left them.
He stepped out of the shop into the afternoon street.
And while there was no drama or anybody who stopped moving or saying anything, heads did turn. A woman walking past looked at him, looked away, and then looked back. Two students in academy uniforms slowed a little as they passed him going the other direction.
Lymur walked through all of it completely unaware, hands in his jacket pockets, already thinking about where to find food and whether he had enough left over to make a reasonable plan for the next few days.
Behind him, two girls who had just passed him on the street turned around at the exact same moment and watched him go. He turned a corner and disappeared into the crowd, and had no idea any of it had happened.