When we left the second guardhouse, we entered onto a wide cobbled road with gutters on either side. Two and three-story buildings in a myriad of architectural styles lined either side, their signs hovered above the road, leaves in a forest’s canopy. Made from the same rust red stone of the mesa some buildings had angular swirled patterns in various greens and blues painted onto their facades. While others, made from timber and a mix of other stones, towered over the rest of the street.

  I saw one building, a spindly thing that advertised itself with a faded depiction of an open book, made from a bone white material streaked through with brown.

  Most of the buildings had pointed arches as the main point of their design. Everything from the windows and roofs came together in points. Some of the larger buildings, typically the inns and merchant houses we passed, had protrusions on the outside of the building that made them resemble spider legs.

  The second most common style we passed were simply boxy constructions, like pieces of a fort torn off and repurposed. Others still, resembled the longhouses common back in the forest.

  Further into the distance I could see the wall of the next district. Taller than the one we’d just passed through. Even in daylight, I could see a faint green glow from its runes. In sunlight, the runes weren’t nearly as noticeable as they were at night, but they still tinted all the roofs within three blocks a faint green color.

  Rather than curve out of sight like Woodsedge, and the other cities I’d read about, the outer wall curved and intersected with the larger wall in front of us. Like it was a late addition to the city, a bubble of protection made after the fact.

  “The wall’s not a ring.” Nora said, vocalizing my thoughts.

  “What’d you mean?” Mika asked as he squeezed through a group of five [Merchants] coming back from lunch.

  “You can see where the outer wall meets the inner. It doesn’t circle the city.” She said and pointed to the intersection I’d just noticed.

  “It’s tradition.” Ellen interjected.

  Nora waited for Ellen to elaborate, but the taller woman didn’t. She just smirked at her friend and waited for her to ask.

  “What’s the tradition?” Nora asked with rolled eyes and a smile.

  Ellen smiled back and clasped her arms behind her back. With a puffed-up chest, she strutted forwards a few steps like a lecturer before a class.

  “Dustreach began as a humble fort; but as the empire expanded, people realized it was the center point between three frontier provinces and slowly, more and more trade passed through here. Both to the heartlands and between the frontiers.

  “Eventually, a shanty town popped up in front of the fort wall and when that grew too large, the first Dustwarden built another wall around it, and that cycle has continued. A population boom follows an increase in trade, and then a new shanty town is built outside the walls. After that town grows large enough, they build a new wall around it and connect it to the whole.”

  “I thought that was how all your cities grew, except they tear down the new wall to clear the way for a new one.” I said.

  “Yeah, they usually do. Dustreach didn’t for two reasons.” Ellen continued in her lecturer tone, though her eyes darted to Mika to make sure he was listening. “First is that the original keep backs up onto the cliff off the mesa, so there’s no way to build the walls in an actual ring. The second reason is that the first Dustwarden didn’t want to keep destroying the runes on his wall, so he just kept the original and built new ones whenever a district got big enough to require them.”

  “Sounds like an eccentric.” Mika said.

  “Yeah, he was pretty out there towards the end of his life. The result is really pretty though. From the top of the palace, you can see the outlines of all the walls and it looks like a rose.”

  “Is that where it gets the nickname?” Nora asked.

  “Nickname?”

  “Yeah, some books in the library called Dustreach ‘The Rose of the Frontier’. It’s a little on the nose now that I know about the walls, but I guess it fits.”

  “From what Irene told me, it was a royal delegate that gave the city that name, so blame him.” Ellen said.

  The four of us had no idea where we were going, but Maggie seemed to. The first gate out of the district had a line two blocks long. We had to wait twenty minutes to get up to the gate. We passed through under the watchful eyes of two guards and a dozen gargoyles into a new district.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Like the previous district, most of the buildings were that same rust red of mesa stone. Those that weren’t uniformly comprised timber and slate tiled roofs. More trees than I’d seen since leaving the forest dotted the streets in small green spaces only a couple of meters in diameter. Through the shouts of [Street Vendors] and [Advertisers] alike, I could hear the distinctive ring of a [Smith’s] hammer from deeper into the district, away from the main road.

  Along the principal thoroughfare we rarely came across houses, and those that we did were second floor apartments above shops, or massive walled estates that flew banners outside their gates. It was only as we passed side streets that I could catch glimpses of residential buildings for those who lived here.

  We passed another two districts and gates into a walled neighborhood no bigger than Hearthome. Every building was palatial. Statues depicting [Heroes] of every variety lined the street. Rather than fly banners, massive murals of the owner’s sigil painted the front walls, along with the odd sigil of a liege lord.

  Next, we passed through a district that, compared to the rest of the city, was iconoclast to the extreme. Made from marble where possible and whitewashed limestone where not, the vast majority of the district comprised modest residential homes and apartments. The only communal buildings were the rare restaurant and the far more common temple.

  Each temple we passed differed only slightly from the rest of the district, but what made them distinct were the stages. Every temple had a stage made of the mesa’s stone and accented with golden trim. A shrine dedicated to a woman with three faces in front of each. Every face expressed a different emotion, and none of the shrines I passed had a repeated another’s.

  About half way through the district, we passed a small cluster of [Clerics] on about their business. I would have found it no more remarkable than any other time I had seen [Clerics] if it hadn’t been for the art spirits that danced among them.

  Humanoid figures made of a shifting rainbow of hues, the spirits danced from shoulder to shoulder on the [Clerics] and played games with each other. Some chased their brethren amidst their contractors, others had ethereal exiles in front of them and painted the district or a passerby. Another marched back and forth across a [Cleric’s] palm, an intangible script in front of them as it read lines with its holder in a language I’d never heard before.

  “They’re Beldia’s.” Maggie said. “Best not to distract them.”

  I’d never heard of the Divinity, but the name held weight for the rest of the party, who all straightened and moved on in a hurry. I wanted to ask why she was a big deal, but worried I might cross some cultural taboo if I did so.

  “She may be a goddess of dramatic plays.” Maggie said over her shoulder to me. “But it is always wise to step lightly around a goddess of spirits, no?”

  That got my attention. If Divinities were the children of the Dao, spirits were the children of the Material Plane. Powerful in their own way, every single one was a powerful embodiment of some aspect of their mother.

  As we passed through more districts, each of them distinct from its neighbors, I noticed that the shops we passed grew more opulent and the buildings larger. The variety of materials never got less varied, but as we trekked deeper into the city, the buildings grew to include more decorations. Small statues to guard front doors and stain glass windows seemed the most popular choices.

  The more buildings I saw deep in the city, the more I noticed that the vast majority of the stained glass designs included a lot of green. And in the richest houses, those windows were always rune enforced.

  “What’s with the runes on that house?” Nora asked.

  She pointed to a three-story house made from stone the color of slate but veined with rivers of green and built in that pointed style with at least a dozen of those spider leg arches coming from the back tower.

  “The ones on the windows?” Mika asked.

  “Yeah, I only see them in the rich houses. What do they do?”

  “They block out the glow from the walls.” Ellen said.

  “Why aren’t they in every house, then?” I asked. “I imagine it’s a nightmare to fall asleep in this city.”

  “It’s complicated. With the propaganda the duchess rolls out every year, most people don’t actually mind the green light. Usually, they’ve developed their own way to deal with it, hence all the green glass, but she was having a real hard time convincing any mercantile house or minor nobles to move here. To fix that, she had a team of [Runesmiths] work for a couple of years on making a rune series that only blocks out light that’s the specific green they use for the runes. It makes sunlight look a little weird, but from what I’ve been told, it completely blocks out the light from the walls.”

  It took us four hours and past seventeen gates – each district with its own culture and subcultures – for Maggie to take us off the principal road and onto some side streets. The winding series of streets she led us down, while still main roads for their communities, were much smaller than the road we’d followed until then.

  She eventually led us into a large plaza, a fountain carved to look like children dumping buckets into the main basin, took up much of the center. Longhouses of various sizes surrounded the plaza on all sides. Not dissimilar to Iona’s home near the Sacred Grove.

  Maggie led us to the largest of the longhouses. The other buildings obscured its length, but it was three times wider than any other. Topped with a beam delicately carved in a flowing pattern, the swirls intersecting at chaotic angles; and a portrayal of a large predatory bird capped the roof beam. Its massive dagger like beak hung warningly over the entry.

  The longhouse was so green I thought it painted at first, but as we neared, I saw that the wood itself was actually green. The color was so deep that the only way I could think to achieve it myself was to take a piece of verawood and leave it in green dye for a century.

  “Anyone know what kind of wood this is?” I asked as I drew my finger along the spiral grain of the logs.

  Nobody knew which, while disappointing, wasn’t surprising. Still, before we left town, I wanted to ask somebody if they knew. Maybe I’d even take a sapling for myself home.

  We entered a large common room with a shockingly squat roof. At the back, a large bar rested in the shadow of three skulls. On either side of a clear lane to the bar, were dozens upon dozens of tables.

  “Maggie, do you know what those skulls belonged to?” Nora asked.

  “The one on the left is pretty famous. It’s the skull of the wyvern that originally had its den on top of the mesa, but all I know about the other two is that they’re from the Under Tunnels.”

  The wyvern’s skull was like the gharials I’d seen in the Clear River Sect’s land, if gharials grew to be hundreds of feet long. The end of the skull’s long snout hung out almost to the middle of the room, supported by a cable that wrapped around its upper jaw to connect to the ceiling beam. Its eyeholes were incredibly large and opposed to actual gharials, the skull only had a dozen teeth. Granted, each tooth was the size of a short sword and serrated enough to be used as a saw.

  The skull in the middle looked mammalian, but lacked any eye cavities and had a heart-shaped flare of bone that held what I assumed was a massive nasal cavity. Rather than fangs, the skull had a set of four molar-like teeth at the front of its jaws and two massive bone plates at the rear.

  The final skull was still incredibly large but also the smallest of the three and shaped like a dull tent spike. Its beak came to a rounded point, and I couldn’t imagine a beast like that was suited to anything else besides digging tunnels.

  The common room looked empty, with only a sixth of the tables occupied. However, I was sure that if you put all the people here now back into Woodsedge’s Guild Hall, the common room would be full to bursting. A single man staffed the bar, his long black hair framed a face marred by an oft-broken nose. He looked to be at the oldest in his mid-twenties, but with the Guild’s policy of only hiring non-combatants who’d spent a year as journeymen, he could have been centuries old.

  “How are you fine folk doing?” The [Barkeep] said with a smile. “What can I get you?”

  “I’m Maggie Highriver, daughter of Frank Highriver. I’m here to pick up a bounty I set aside for my party in Woodsedge.”