Creation Mage 6 by Dante King (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📗

relishing the reprieve the female Chaosbane had granted me by pulling me out of the swirling foot traffic.

“What do you think?” Leah asked me. “Is it like the big cities on Earth?”

“No,” I said, looking around with wide eyes, “it’s way better than any city on Earth.”

And I wasn’t exaggerating just to please the woman.

The crescent piazza was filled with representatives of every kind of race or species imaginable, and plenty more that I had never imagined could exist. What was more, the magic casually on display made the everyday magic of the Mazirian Academy look like sleight of hand. True, at the Academy, it was generally assumed that anyone studying there didn’t yet quite have full control over their abilities, but it was really something to see how people in Avalonia used magic in their daily lives.

Not far from the fountain, a couple of mages dressed in bright yellow robes and sporting hats carved from some kind of hardwood, were using their vectors to lever up cracked paving slabs and replace them with new ones.

Up one side street, a Ghoulish woman, as fat as a tick and ugly enough to be hired out to haunt a house, leaned out of a window with an armful of washing. As I watched, the woman threw the washing carelessly into the air, made a slashing gesture with her hand, and fixed it in place. I blinked and squinted. It was like she had just lobbed the washing out and perfectly landed it on a line that did not exist.

Off to one side of the fountain, a collection of very tall figures, dressed from head to foot in fur-trimmed robes, pointed this way and that. Anyone who had ever seen tourists trying to figure out how the hell they were meant to get back to their hotel could tell what was going on with them. As they argued amongst each other, I caught brief glimpses of their faces and hands. They had strange metallic skin that reflected the light seeping through the breaking clouds above us.

“Who are those guys?” I asked Leah loudly, pointing at the group of metal men.

“No idea, sugar-butt,” Leah said amicably. One of the men had seen us looking, and he pulled the finger back at me. With him staring right at me, what I had taken to be metallic skin looked more like straight metal than actual skin.

“You don’t know what kind of people they are?” I asked the female Chaos Mage.

“No, I haven’t set eyes on their like before,” Leah said. “What does it matter anyway? I’ve only met a handful of Earthlings in my time, but I’ve always found the same odd thing about them.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Most of them struck me as the kind of people who wanted to eat a variety of foods and drink a mix of drinks, but weren’t really too keen on varying the kinds of people with whom they ate the foods and drank the drinks.”

I considered this. I thought that there could be something to her words.

“There are a lot of people in this world, aren’t there?” I said.

Leah grunted a laugh. She gestured about her. “As you see.”

There were elves, nymphs, humans, and dwarves, of course, but there were also armored knights with purple plumes floating form their plumes, ifrits with burning eyes, naga women with flat faces and swaying hips and no visible feet, ogres, orcs, and sirens, brawny barbarians carrying swords as long as I was tall, and all the usual rogues, mercenaries, and peddlers recognizable by anyone who had ever played an MMORPG.

Leah grabbed my hand again and began towing me through the mass of people. Clearly, she had spent her time up on the beautifully carved fountain a little more profitably than me. Rather than gawking around like a stunned mullet, Leah had been coming up with a route to get us to the Castle of Ascendance.

She towed me through the streets, while I tried to stop marveling at anything and everything. Huge banners hung from some buildings, which Leah told me were the different sigils of some of the more influential, richer, and older houses in Manafell.

“I think it’s safe to say that Queen Hagatha’s policy on no four-legged conveyances shitting in the street is a good move,” I said.

“How so?” Leah asked over her shoulder. She was still holding my hand, straining ahead like a hound following a scent.

“This is the cleanest city that I have ever been in,” I said.

It was too. Despite the people hustling and bustling, yelling and shoving and acting in a way that would have made the roughest New Yorker feel proud, the place was spotless.

There was no trash to speak of. Anything that was discarded on the street was usually organic; some food or a leaf wrapping or something like that. The snow was heaped into perfect mounds and strips, which I guessed had probably been achieved through magic. Even the advertising was less offensive to the eye in this world—cleverer and more thoughtful. There were trees everywhere. It gave the bustling metropolis this feeling of being out in the wild and yet with every convenience the average mage could ask for. It was London meets Aspen.

“Yuletide’s in full swing here too, huh?” I said to Leah as we skirted a group of gnomes piled up into a standing pyramid and singing carols.

“Of course,” Leah said, guiding me up a steep street leading out of the madness of the city center. “Any excuse for a party, treacle-lips. You’ve been in Avalonia long enough to know that about the people, surely?”

Decorations hung from fairy-lit lamp posts and trees. Above, shooting stars continuously streaked up and down. Baubles grew and grew like expanding shining bubbles before popping with festive tinkling noises, only to reappear further down the road. Sparkling lengths of