Drade had something to do before he made his way back home.

He walked through the city until he ended in an alley, next to a seemingly random brick wall with graffiti sprayed on it. He could see an invisible gate of magic in the wall with his manasense. He began playing a game of rock-paper-scissors with the wall. He landed on scissors first, rock second, and paper last. Once a passerby had walked past the premises, leaving Drade entirely alone, a magic doorway began to glow a soft blue. Drade walked in.

Inside was Sirla and Wurn’s restaurant, where numerous upper-class stars from around the world were dining. Drade couldn’t recognize any of them, though.

Wurn took an order from a small family that wore some of the more modest clothes in the diner. Their child was holding a shaker filled with water. When he shook it, snow fell like salt onto his food.

Sirla, on the other hand, was busy pouring a drink for someone while attending to her cooking with her static-controlled hair.

Drade walked to the bar and sat down. Sirla looked to him as her hair moved seemingly without her attention, her hands entirely idle. “Drade, you’re back? Did you find the elementalists?”

Drade shook his head and replied to her in a needlessly polite tone, “I’m sorry, I haven’t gotten to personally do that yet, but I’ve asked one of my accomplices to. I was actually wondering about the firearm I left here. I’d like it back.”

Sirla seemed disappointed but had become much more forgiving since his last visit. “Oh, well, I guess I’ll call you about it in a few days. In the meantime, why don’t I get you a drink if you’re here to talk to Wurn. He’s a little busy at the moment, though, so give him a sec’. You are here to talk to Wurn, right?” She had finished a dish and placed it on the counter in front of the person beside Drade.

Drade nodded, “Sort of. I’ll tell you what I want in a bit.”

“Wurn! Comere’ when you have the chance. Drade’s gonna talk to you about your enchantment stuff!” she called before looking back to Drade. “Just give him a second.” Finished with her cooking, she walked to a sink filled with sanitizer water and dunked her bed of hair in it. She began washing her hair under the water. Afterward, she rinsed her hair off in an instant by using her staticmancy to negate the cohesion of the water, causing the liquid to drain from her head like rocks.

In the meantime, the person next to Drade looked over to him after taking a short drink. “Hey, my name’s Walter. What’s yours?” He held out his hand to Drade.

Before returning the handshake, Drade quickly skimmed over the man’s mana. He took his hand. “I’m Drade.”

The man was probably striking, Drade guessed. He was maybe in is late twenties, with cloudy-blue eyes, perfect skin, large but not intimidating muscles, and was probably considered the peak of human physicality by many people. He pulled back his hand to take another sip of his drink. He spoke with a soft, cool authority. “So, who are you?”

“Some kid with a lot of luck. Who are you?” Drade actually couldn’t care less about the answer, but he might as well wait for Wurn with some idle conversation.

“Just some man looking to spice his life up.”

“You already sound like the type of person who’d throw their life away for a struggle,” Drade said in a harsh tone.

Walter paused for a moment, surprised. “Right on the mark, there, Drade.” He took another sip.

Drade could smell the alcohol. “Is Sirla really able to sell that at her age?”

Walter shrugged, “I think this counts as her own country. I mean, who is enforcing the rules, right?”

Drade nodded, then looked to Sirla, who was still washing her hair. “I want grapefruit juice!”

“Got it,” she said, not questioning the specific choice.

Drade continued the conversation, “What brought you here, then?”

“Oh, I was among the first batch to be invited. A letter came in th’ mail one day that shone like the stars, an’ inside was a cryptic riddle. I was hooked instantly.” He got a slight country accent as he talked about the event. “And what brought you?”

“Magic.”

“How vague and mysterious. I take it you weren’t invited then?”

“Nope. I affect the fabric of reality nearby through my very presence, causing the most unlikely and unforeseen of things to happen in my wake. In other words, I’m very, very lucky. I simply picked a discarded letter up from the ground on impulse and followed its riddle to the entrance, the first time I came here.”

Walter laughed. “That is lucky! The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was when I got pushed off a building and survived through the sheer luck of falling onto a garbage dump! Can you trump that?” Walter gave him a challenging smirk.

Drade was just challenged to a duel few in the world could ever hope to win. He decided to chuckle a bit, erasing his deadpan face before beginning his story. “When I was nine years old, I got ran over by a garbage truck but managed to duck underneath it.”

“Ha! That’s pretty good!”

“HA! And you fell for my trap. Thinking that that was all to the story was a misstep! The truck was actually leaking oil, and some spilled onto my clothes, so ofter I pulled myself up onto my feet and got shot by a bolt of fire by a pyromancer I had been fighting just before the truck came around. So, I was not only badly burnt, but my clothes had lit on fire in an instant because of the oil! Then, burning alive, I doused myself in a convenient, small pool of frozen water. Just in time to save me before the pyromancer shot me with another volley of fire, a vapourmancer, who was rivals with the pyromancer -it’s a long story- was able to use the steam produced by the water I’d bathed in to protect me from the pyromancer. I would have called up my vitomancer to heal me, but I was burnt so badly I couldn’t move. It then turned out that the truck that had been leaking oil had blown up in front of her house, so she ran out and found me just in time to save me before I was scarred for life.” Drade shrugged, knowing nobody would believe the story but still happy with whatever the result might be.

Walter started laughing hysterically-it took him a minute to calm down, wiping the tears from his eyes with a napkin. “That’s definitely not an ordinary story, pal! Ya got me there!” he finished calming down, then spoke again, “Well, I’ll be seein’ ya. That kid over there wants my autograph, so I’ll oblige for his sake. Hope t’see you again!” He took his drink and plate and walked to the table where the family was dining.

Wurn replaced him in short order, though, and placed a piece of paper onto the counter for Sirla to pick up. “Yo! Drade, good to see you again. Did’ja come here t’ talk about souls n’ stuff?”

Drade shrugged. “That and I want my handgun back.”

Wurn nodded. “Yeah. So the reason I asked ya’ about souls is cuz’ in the enchantin’ community, we consider souls pseudoscientific stuff, so we tend to ignore em’ when implementing our spells.”

“Interesting, given the nature of your magic...I’ll give you some information, but I’ll get back to you later with more. I’m preparing an experiment tomorrow that’ll help me learn more about how they work.”

“Great, so ya’ can tell me the basics?”

Sirla, who had finished washing her hair, gave Drade a cup of grapefruit juice and took Wurn’s piece of paper. “I make that stuff myself, so you better enjoy it!”

Drade nodded to Sirla, surprisingly cheerful. “Thanks, Sirla! Now, Wurn, Let’s go through the basics that I’m sure about...

There are three types of souls, embodiment souls, strung souls, and amorphous souls. Strung souls are the most common type of soul. It spreads magic through the body, controlling bodily functions to a small degree...

Tell me, Wurn, when you enchant items, do you need to use your hands to channel magic into the items?”

Wurn sat straight, sure Drade knew what he was talking about. “Yeah, I usually have to touch the item to interact with its magic.”

Drade spread his arms out and put his palms up in a shrug of sorts. “You’re able to do that because your soul pours magic through your arm and into your hands to let you enchant items. Next is an ‘embodiment’ soul...

While a strung soul is methodically ‘strung’ throughout the body, an embodiment soul ‘embodies’ the body. A strung soul could be cut or shoved out of your body, while an embodiment soul is your body. Someone with an embodiment soul can’t be knocked out, can’t be possessed -not in the same way a strung soul can be- and, at least in my case, I would self-destruct if my soul was ejected from my body, somehow. Any questions?”

“So What happens if ya’ used your soul’s magic then?”

“It would eat into my very being. The overall ramifications of that may be something nobody knows. Only about one in a million humans have an embodiment soul, and I only have one because I’m not fully human.”

“Right, uh, you said your sister was an eldritch...entity.”

“Which makes me one-fourth eldritch,” Drade said like it was perfectly natural. “The last kind of soul is an ‘amorphous soul’.

Amorphous souls are loosely connected to their bodies, or not even in one. They are found in any type of apparition and seen in about one in a million humans, the same as an embodiment soul. They’re far more common, though, because all it takes to make one is ejecting someone’s soul.”

“Apparitions...?”

“Types of ghosts or monsters.”

Wurn was eating the information up but couldn’t hide his growing skepticism. “You’re telling me that ghosts exist?”

“Everything could exist. Magic is capable of literally anything, everything, nothing, and the realm beyond.”

“Anythin’?”

“With enough magic, you could rewrite history, destroy and remake the universe, modify the laws that bind our reality, turn a planet alive, or even destroy the very concept of reality or nothingness. Of course, even if you found a way to gather large quantities of magic, that doesn’t account for what you need to manipulate it into doing what you want, which is a whole nother’ subject I’m not getting into. Still, for all I know, there’s a way to make those possibilities a reality without breaking a sweat, but some sort of ancient magic is holding us back from that potential.”

“Is the world of magic really that vast?”

“Magic is not just one art but instead scattered throughout the world in an innumerable number of different cultures and places, used in an innumerable number of different ways over an innumerable number of years with an innumerable number of different techniques and secrets. Nobody will ever learn everything about it.”

Wurn smiled smugly. “I thought ya’ said anything was possible with magic. Surely it’s possible to, then.”

Drade shrugged. “Touche. Just remember: souls are a little finicky. Failing to utilize their powers properly can result in catastrophic collateral damage. I think you can pull something off with your magic, though.” Drade had been drinking the grapefruit juice periodically and just now finished it. He slid off his chair and prepared to leave.

“Hey! What about that thing you mentioned?!” Sirla asked.

“What thing?”

“About Wurn putting his soul into his magic items.”

“Oh, yeah, that.” Drade looked back to Wurn. “Enchanters can manipulate magic in a lot of ways, but you do it by injecting portions of your souls into objects, then restructuring them to manipulate mana however you need them to.” Wurn and Sirla seemed quite perplexed, or maybe mortified, for some reason, so Drade continued. “So, for example, you put a grain of your soul into that snow seasoner bottle thingie, and it uses its passively generated magic to turn water into powder snow. Does that clear things up?”

“S-so..” Wurn began, his expression unchanged, “Ya telling me that every enchanter in the world is selling their souls.”

“Yeah, basically.”

“I-is that an issue?! Am I going t’ die if I use my magic too much?”

“Yes, and yes. Consuming your soul may come with many side effects, including: sometimes feeling so empty inside that you don’t want to do anything, getting random headaches, having below-average luck, lessening the magic you can output, increasing the likelihood of developing a chronic mental disorder young, regular seizures, being weak to metaphysical attacks, feeling dizzy when using magic, wanting to die, forgetting strangely obvious facts you should know, losing track of what you’re doing, feeling like you aren’t in control of your body, or that it does not belong to you, and other miscellaneous mental and physical occurrences.”

...

Seeing the frozen expressions on the two’s faces, Drade tried to smooth things over in an out-of-character fashion. “I mean, you’ve used about three percent of your soul, you’ll be fine. ”

Sirla looked to Wurn with worry. His eyes were moving randomly, unsettled.

“Uhh, yeah. If that’s all, I’m gonna leave.”

Drade made his way out, and the two were left to stew in the busy place’s silence.

“So, Wurn, maybe we should turn in for the day?” Sirla suggested.

“N-no, I’ll be fine. It’s no problem at all.” Wurn slipped off his chair, a little unsteady. “Besides, why would he even know all those effects? I mean, who would profile that sort of thing? What, is there some soul medical agency or something?”

Yes, yes, there was.