He reached the North Gate a little before full dark, torchlight already coming up along the wall, and for one embarrassing second felt his eyes go hot at the sight of it up close.
I finally made it.
The guards wanted an ID before they'd let him through — his first time leaving the village, so one of them pointed him toward a registration office just inside the gate. A short while later, a few coppers lighter and mildly stunned by how simple the whole process actually was, he had one: a plain card with his name and village of origin, nothing more.
Past the gate, the city opened into dense, practical stone housing and workshops — the outer ring, someone at the registration office had called it, though Kaelid hadn't grasped that Avalon was built in rings until he actually saw it laid out in front of him: streets curving instead of running straight, the whole city clearly folded in on itself toward some center he couldn't see from here.
He used his new ID again almost immediately, following directions toward the Adventurer's Guild — which, apparently, meant a walk deeper in, past the outer ring's markets and crowded housing and into a second ring entirely, wealthier and busier both. The pale stone of the outer ring gave way to something darker here — Umbra Stone, someone called it when he asked, the hardest, most prized building material anyone quarried, black enough that it seemed to drink daylight rather than reflect it. Banks and artisan shops crowded the street alongside a proper market square.
Avalon was bigger than anything he'd imagined — nearly three hundred thousand people packed behind walls built to keep monsters out, reinforced hard enough to survive it if they ever got in anyway. Most of the faces in the crowd were human, same as him, but not all of them — a sharp-eared elf haggling over the price of produce at a fruit stall, a broad, heavily-bearded dwarf hauling a cart of raw ore toward what had to be a smithy, once even a woman with faintly glowing eyes and something curling and horn-like tucked back into her hairline that he didn't have a name for and didn't stare long enough to guess. His village hadn't had a single person in it who wasn't human. Avalon, apparently, had room for all of it.
Nobody looked twice at his hair, either. Old habit kept him bracing for a reaction that simply never came. Nobody here had ever heard of a village that split hair into red and blue. He was just another face in a crowded city, and for the first time in his life, that felt like relief instead of insult.
Stone and brick buildings rose two and three stories on every street, adventurers, blacksmiths, soldiers, and ordinary tradespeople moving around each other like the whole city ran on some rhythm he hadn't learned yet. The Guild itself, when he found it, was made of plain pale wood — which struck him as strange for a second among all that black stone, until he realized the building didn't need to be sturdy. The people inside were deadlier than any wall could be.
The receptionist took his ID, asked a few basic questions — what he could do, what he wanted to be called for job postings — and that was it. No ceremony, no test, no rank stamped onto a title like it was part of his name. Just a plain wooden card with Swordsman written across it in neat handwriting, because that was the honest, simple truth of what he was: a guy who fought with a sword, however badly, just trying to make a living.
By the time he stepped back outside, exhaustion had caught up with him all at once, and he doubled back toward the outer ring rather than push deeper into the city tonight — he'd been told the cheaper inns clustered there, closer to the gate he'd come in through, and cheap sounded exactly right for a kid with almost nothing left in his pockets.
He found one easily enough — a copper a night, two with food included, which felt like nothing after eleven days of stretching bread and monster meat as far as it would go. A young woman named Eve brought his dinner — long blonde hair, azure eyes, probably not much older than him — and lingered a moment, curious, when he mentioned he'd walked the whole way here on foot.
"You really camped out where monsters roam? The whole way?"
"Didn't have much of a choice." He rubbed absently at the still-healing line across his ribs. "Worst week of my life so far."
Her eyes went a little wide. "How bad?"
Bad enough I nearly died twice.
"Bad enough," he said instead, which felt truer than trying to explain a tree that had almost strangled him to a stranger on his first night in the city.
She smiled, told him he ought to find himself a party before he tried something like that again, and left him to it.
Maybe finding a party won't be so bad, he thought, watching her go, as long as everyone's at least half that easy to talk to.
Then he shook the thought off, ate, and went to sleep in an actual bed for the first time in nearly two weeks — bruised, scarred a little deeper than he'd expected to be this early, but alive, and one step closer to everything he'd left home to become.
Kaelid woke to sunlight actually coming through a window, which felt like enough of a novelty on its own to be worth noticing.
Breakfast came with the room — eggs, thick-cut bread, some kind of spiced sausage he didn't recognize — and he ate slower than he needed to, savoring it in a way that would've embarrassed him if anyone had been watching closely enough to notice. Warm food. Someone else's cooking. He hadn't realized how much he'd missed both until the first bite hit his tongue and, for one unguarded second, tasted almost exactly like home.
Gods, I forgot food could taste like this.
He cleaned the plate down to nothing and sat with the last of his tea a while longer than strictly necessary, in no hurry at all to leave a chair that wasn't the ground.
Eventually, business won out over comfort. He dug through his pack and laid out everything he'd looted over the past eleven days — cores, a couple of fangs, whatever else had seemed worth carrying at the time — and sorted through it with more care than he expected to need.
The crabta core he set aside without a second thought. A hard-won mercy had come from that fight, in a manner of speaking — the first real kill of this whole miserable trip, the closest thing he had to a story worth telling yet, and something about selling it off felt wrong in a way he didn't bother examining too closely. The two wolf cores he set aside too, for less sentimental reasons — those wolves had very nearly killed him, and if he ever managed to have something forged from what was left of them, it felt like it ought to mean something, even if he had no idea yet what that something would actually be called.
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Everything else — the boar-thing's core, whatever core the treant had left worth collecting — he packed up separately to sell.
Everything has a price. Everything except a good breakfast, apparently.
He asked at the front desk where he might sell monster cores, and Eve pointed him toward a shop not far from the Guild — convenient enough that he could handle both errands without much extra walking. He thanked her, shouldered his pack, and stepped back out into Avalon's outer ring with considerably less dread than he'd walked through the gate with the night before.
The shop Eve pointed him toward sat tucked between a tannery and something that smelled faintly of gunpowder, a modest storefront with CORES & MATERIALS painted plain across the window.
The man behind the counter didn't look up right away, sorting something small and glittering into trays with the kind of practiced boredom that came from doing the same job for decades. When Kaelid finally set his haul down — the boar-thing's core, whatever he'd pulled off the treant — the man's eyebrows did go up, just slightly.
"Rough road in?"
"Something like that."
The shopkeeper turned the boar-thing's core over once, held it to the light. "Whelp-class, Ordinary. Common enough — ten silver." He set it aside and picked up the treant's core next, taking longer with this one, checking it from a couple of angles before he seemed satisfied. "Huh. Whelp-class too, this one, but I'd bet good money it fought like it thought it was worth more. Ordinary rank, still." He glanced up. "You didn't get that banged up from something this common, did you?"
"It grabbed me before I saw it coming," Kaelid said, which wasn't really an answer, but the man let it go.
"Ten silver on this one too, then. Plus—" he nudged the leftover fangs Kaelid had almost forgotten to include, "—these aren't cores, just material, but tanners and fletchers pay for good fang stock. Call it five silver on top."
Kaelid did the math twice before he trusted it. Twenty-five silver. A quarter of a gold, if that, for eleven days and four things that nearly killed him.
Twenty-five silver. A fortune back in the village, but out here? Probably barely enough to look at a decent piece of steel.
He wasn't sure if that felt like a fair trade or an insulting one. He decided not to think about it too hard, pocketed the coin, and thanked the man on his way back out into the street.
Guess that settles it. Definitely not getting rich off cores this early.
He checked the sun's position, adjusted his pack, and turned his steps toward the Guild.
The Guild hall was quiet, most of its usual crowd already out chasing jobs — plain, pale wood standing out sharply against the black stone surrounding it on every side, like it had wandered into Ring 2 from somewhere else entirely and never left.
Kaelid made his way to the reception desk anyway, greeted the receptionist by name — Emma, according to the little plate on her desk, green hair falling past her shoulders and hazel eyes that gave him a quick, practiced once-over — and asked if there were any solo jobs suited to a rookie on his own.
"Couldn't find anyone to team up with?" she asked, not unkindly.
"You could say that."
"Would you mind if I helped with that instead?"
He didn't mind at all.
She disappeared for a while, and when she came back, she wasn't alone. A red-haired girl trailed a step behind her, amber eyes sharp and assessing—close enough to his own color that he nearly did a double take. A bow, nearly as tall as she was, rested across her back.
Guess she's only had luck finding one person too. Not the worst deal. If it doesn't work out, I can always look elsewhere.
"Kaelid, this is Aria. She's an archer."
"Nice to meet you, Aria. Kaelid. Swordsman, for whatever that's worth."
"Likewise."
Emma left them to it, and for a moment neither of them said much of anything.
"How long have you been an adventurer?" Kaelid asked eventually.
"About six months. You?" Aria asked.
"Registered yesterday."
That got a longer silence than he expected.
"Have you killed much?" he tried again.
"On my way here, three. All wolves," she said.
"Killed five myself," Kaelid replied. "Crabta, a boar-thing, two wolves, and... something that used to be a tree, I guess."
Aria's expression went a little dazed. "You killed a crabta? Alone? Right after leaving your village?"
"Yeah, I guess I did." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Wasn't exactly graceful about it."
"I wasn't holding out much hope for this," she admitted, "but I think this party just got a lot more promising."
They talked a while longer — her experience bouncing between a few different rookie-and-veteran mixed parties over the past six months, none of which had lasted, though she didn't seem eager to explain why.
Probably better not to ask. People die out here. That's just how it is.
They checked the job board together. Most listings needed at least an Enlightened party — a few needed Apostles or Apex-rank, which Kaelid gave a wide, respectful berth to. One entry in particular caught his eye, its edges curled and yellowed in a way the postings around it weren't: the Snow King, a Damned Dread-class yeti whose nest sat somewhere near a mountain peak, responsible for more than one assault on Avalon's walls.
Yeah, no. Give me literally anything else, universe. Throw a rookie a bone here.
Aria found it a moment later — a straightforward job hunting frost wolves. Ordinary beasts. Exactly their speed.
"You're amazing," Kaelid said, grinning. "Perfect pick."
They locked it in with Emma, who looked pleased enough about the new partnership that she didn't even ask many questions.
Before they parted ways for the day, Kaelid lingered at the desk a moment longer.
"Is there anywhere in this city someone actually trains? Real training, I mean. Not just swinging a sword at trees on my own."
Emma glanced up, considering him for a second like she was deciding whether he was serious. "Captain Yami takes on rookies sometimes, if you catch him in the right mood. South Gate tower — can't miss it, it's the one that looks like it's daring something to attack it." A faint smile. "Fair warning, though. He doesn't say yes to everyone who asks."
"I'm feeling lucky," he said, with a greedy little smile he didn't bother hiding. "One more thing — I've got some cores I want turned into actual gear. Anyone in this city worth trusting with that, or is it a lottery?"
"John, Ring 2, a few streets past the market square. Bell over the door, can't miss that either." She said it without having to think about it. "Overcharges a little, but he doesn't cut corners, and he won't take a job he doesn't think he can do right. Worth the walk."
"Appreciated."
He caught up with Aria outside. Yami and John would have to wait; first, he needed to survive the snow. They headed northwest out of the gate together, the snowy foothills of the Death Mountains stretching out ahead of them.