The door swung open faster that it had any right to, revealing Arilyn standing in the doorway. Her eyes widened at the sight of me halfway out of the water, my skin slick with moisture. “Oh!” she exclaimed, her cheeks turning a deep crimson.

  “Uh, hi,” I said smoothly. There was no getting around it, and I was at an extreme disadvantage as her eyes took me in. Or at least what she could see. I wasn’t fully out of the water, and the light was low. My Catholic upbringing screamed that this was wrong, and I needed to cover myself immediately.

  But then I thought of rule number nine: when all else fails, be like water and flow with it. I was panicking, and that was the last thing I needed to do. “Just give me a moment,” I said, reaching for the towel.

  The damned thing was out of my reach, but not if I was quick to stand up. In fact, if I just twist a bit while standing, I can avoid giving her an eyeful and maybe keep my dignity! I had a plan.

  As I stood, reached, and twisted, everything seemed to go according to plan. At least until I grabbed at the towel. My feet slipped on the smooth inner surface of the tub, and I kept twisting while I fell out of the tub in a wet heap. I groaned and swore as my audience fell into a fit of giggles and amused meeps.

  “So fucking smooth, Finn,” I muttered under my breath.

  “Are… are you okay?” Arilyn asked between fits of laughter. She moved swiftly toward me, leaving the door open behind her.

  At that moment, the towel slipped off the chair and onto my face. I couldn’t help it; the whole thing was so insanely stupid that I just started laughing.

  Still giggling, she knelt down and pulled the towel off my face, her face still red. “Oh, Gods, Finn! You are ridiculous,” she said, before pulling the towel down further and kissing me. She pulled away, suddenly serious and concerned. “You are okay, aren’t you? Didn’t hit your head or anything?”

  She started checking my head, and neck over; I quickly tried to assuage her apprehension. “I’m not hurt! Other than my pride…”

  Relaxing, she still cradled my head in her hands. They were warm against my wet scalp. A smile played across her face as she looked into my eyes. “Good. I would hate to think I got you hurt. Especially,” she looked slowly over my partially covered body, “when you are in such a state!”

  “Right,” I replied. I sat up, and her hands fell on my shoulders. “I really should get dried off.”

  “Mmmm. I could help with that,” she purred, running her hand down my slick chest toward the towel.

  “What happened? I heard a crash!” Harper’s tired voice came from just outside the door. “Really?” she asked as she leaned her shoulder against the inside of the doorframe. “I try and get some sleep before tomorrow, and you two are already at each other? And you’re not even doing it right!”

  She shook her head and headed toward her room. “At least be a little quieter, would you? Fucking kids…” she snapped in parting.

  Arilyn’s chest heaved with laughter at the cambion’s words. “Why does this keep happening to us, love? Someone always interrupts us just when things are getting interesting!”

  “I have no idea!” I replied, chuckling. “Though I really should get dried off.” I shivered in the cool air.

  She grinned mischievously and grabbed the towel. “Not unless you let me help.”

  MEEP, MEEP!

  The grumpy protestations of Vessa reminded me I still had her locked out of my mind. With a thought, I opened the gate in my mind.

  “No, bad Finn! Bad Heals, no! I’m tired and I want to sleep, and this is too much! Please Finn?” she complained loudly through the bond. It was almost petulant in tone, reminding me she was pretty young. Not only that, Arilyn and I shouldn’t do certain things around her.

  With a sigh of regret, I placed my hand over her towel-clutching one. “Arilyn, stop. As much as I want this—and believe me, I want this—Vessa is both too young for us to get handsy, and we can’t go to your room because she’s not ready to sleep away from me. Can we rain check this? Please?”

  A look of hurt flashed across her face, but only for a moment. Her hand released my only covering, and she clasped my hand. “I guess I thought… no, I’m sorry. I got carried away again,” she said. “This is so not like me. I should go.” Arilyn leaned in and gave me a lingering kiss, her hand warm on my chest. “Mmm. Goodnight, Finn. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Dumbly, I watched her hurry out of the room, closing the door. I realized too late that Arilyn had wanted to talk to me about something. But she was already gone. I shook my head as I got dry and dressed for bed. If I go after her now, she’ll get the wrong idea, I thought. Well, at least we won’t be talking about anything. I desperately wanted, more than anything, to go to her room and spend the night with her.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Even if all we did was talk, as unlikely as that was.

  It wasn’t until breakfast that I remembered I had promised to stop by the Enchanter’s Guild that day. The day before had been so full that I had almost forgotten. I looked up from my half-finished steak and eggs to the rest of my group. Vessa had finished her plate of the same and was eyeing mine with obvious intent. Harper and Arilyn were chatting about what path to take out of the city, with Arilyn sneaking glances at me. Seeing me looking at her, she gave me a quick, warm smile before going back to planning with Harper.

  Setting down my fork, I gave Vessa an under-no-uncertain-terms-are-you-stealing-my-food look and cleared my throat. “I think we need to take into consideration that I need to stop by the Enchanter’s Guild for a couple of hours. Is there anything that can be done while I’m doing that?”

  “Finn, why’d you have to get a freaking job?” Harper asked, annoyance in her voice.

  “Oh, come on. You know I had to for the quest!” I replied, matching her tone.

  Arilyn gasped. “You’re a member of the Enchanter’s Guild? Are they still keeping the…” she glanced around and leaned in close and whispered, “… Identify Item spell under wraps?”

  “How do you—?” I immediately shut my mouth. I couldn’t even accidentally tell anyone about that!

  “Oh, love,” she teasesd. “I work for the Goddess of Knowledge! Of course I know something about the Ten Universal Spells! So are they?”

  “I can’t answer that either way. Sorry Arilyn.”

  Harper’s eyes narrowed. “Let’s keep on track here. You need to work for two hours before we can leave town?” At my nod, she continued: “Alright. Heals, you and I are going shopping for a horse and tack. Vessa, do you want to join us?”

  The little dragon chirped uncertainly and looked at me with cautious excitement. “Can I, Finn? I’d rather be near you, but shopping sounds more fun than watching you work. Please? I want to give it a try.”

  “It’s okay, Vessa. Go have fun with them.”

  “Yay!” she thought at me while hopping up and down on the table, chirping happily.

  “Yay!” Arilyn unknowingly echoed the baby dragon, clapping her hands together. “This should be fun.”

  After finishing breakfast and settling up, we left the inn and rode to the Guild. “Good luck with horse shopping!” I said as they rode away, leaving me to my employment. To my relief, the building looked exactly as it should. No fancy illusions, no crazy faces.

  I entered the Guild and was greeted by Marin. “Welcome back, Finn! Cole and Archin will be happy you’re here, too. We have so many items to catch up on,” she said cheerfully.

  “I’m more than happy to get started,” I replied with a smile. “I’ll only be here for two hours, though. My group and I need to head to the Shadow Lands.”

  “Oh? Well then, you’ll need to take an Enchanter’s Guild slate, ledger, and money box,” she replied, ticking the items off on her fingers. “Just in case, you know, you need to do some official enchanting or identifying.”

  “Wait, I have to work on the road?” I asked incredulously.

  “Well, yes. But only if you run into someone who needs your services,” she stated. “Especially for any Allied Army soldiers. That’s just part of being a member of the Guild! Let’s go in back and I’ll get you your Guild travel supplies.”

  I nodded to Archin and Cole in the back and moved over to a table full of items. I picked up the table notebook and began identifying the various items, writing the item name and imbued or naturally occurring effects for each. After about fifteen minutes, Marin came back with a leather satchel embossed with the Enchanter’s Guild sigil. Which, I realized, was why Harper called the Guild the EG.

  It literally was an intensely fancy “E” and a “G” surrounded by 3 colored circles, the innermost blue, then green, then gold. Other than the two letters, it wasn’t very complex.

  “Inside you’ll find everything you need to do enchanting and identifying. Though until you have more spells, I doubt you’ll be able to entice any customers to pay for anything other than analyzing their magical loot.”

  “Thank you, Marin. I’ll do my best to make you all proud,” I said, and was surprised with how serious I was. I needed to do good by the Guild and actually get their approval.

  Taking a moment to examine the contents of the satchel, I felt an odd buzzing in my head. I focused on it, and my status sheet popped into my vision. That’s never happened before, I thought. But under my name, there was a new area: Affiliations. Next to it, in flashing letters, was the Glorious and Honorable Enchanter’s Guild. Under that was another category: Membership: Full Initiate, level 1.

  That was interesting. I guessed it had to do not only with returning to the guild but also with being given the satchel. I felt some pride in the words, something I hadn’t really known for a while. Taking a quick look at the rest of my status sheet, I noticed that I also had enough experience to level up and shook my head. I hadn’t looked at it in weeks.

  I went ahead and accepted the experience energy, and went up two levels to level 15. The automatic points populated immediately, leaving six points for me to figure out. It didn’t take me long, as I decided to put two points into intelligence raising it beyond the auto-raise of 38 to 40, two into wisdom bumping it up to 37, one into dexterity for bring it to 23, and one into stamina kicking it up to 22. That’s when I noticed that there were two extra points in endurance, raising it to 25. Sweet Jesus, this changed things significantly.

  Now, I don’t know why, but my mana pool skyrocketed from 276 up to 549, almost doubling my available mana points! What was even better was my mana regen rate. It had gone from 3.512 per minute to… to…. Twenty mana points per minute? I was in shock. Effectively, I went from being completely dependent on mana potions to even be useful in a fight, to being able to regenerate a third of a mana point per second! As long as I kept mobile, and managed my mana and spells strategically, I could be a very bad motherfucker in a fight. One of the biggest drawbacks to my class was now mostly negligible.

  Other than the whole magic addiction thing, which was still a problem. That, and only being able to level up three of my spells. Of my Mage spells.

  I winced at the thought of how easy it would be for me to fall into that sinkhole of constant use of magic. There had to be a way to mitigate that.

  “Hey Finn, are you going to just sit there, daydreaming all day?” Cole growled at me.

  “No, sorry. Got distracted by leveling up. I’ll get on it,” I said apologetically.

  “Well, good for you. But we are still behind, and if you’re going to be gallivanting around the countryside for God’s know how long, you could at least clear that table of unidentified items!”

  “Right,” I murmured, looking at the massive pile on the table.

  And I had to be done in less than two hours.

  Well, jeepers! That was close! Normally, I'd have no problem with where things were going. BUT, there was a minor in the room. Yes, she is technically a couple hundred years old. Yes, she's not even the same species.

  Ya'll should be ashamed. This ain't erotica!