PSTH: Chapter Forty-Nine

Tamers should be careful to avoid giving too much good food to their Primals. Primals have the ability to taste, or at least an essence-based ability that is analogous, but food going to a Primal is food that isn’t going to someone who needs it. An occasional luxury is fine, but waste and overindulgence isn’t.  

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Warning from the Tamer’s Consortium after a surprise hail impacted food stores in the new nation of Oceanseed, 209 Modern-Era

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As I glanced over a map of Oceanseed on the train, I couldn’t help but chuckle. Galena town was actually in-between the Tourmaline city and Arkose itself. If I’d been planning things out better, then I probably would have gone in a relatively straightforward line. But hey, if I had done that, I would have probably missed the opportunity to watch a fight between a Councillor and a Regent. Heart’s truth, I might not even have been able to meet Zale if I had. 

As we grew closer, I began to spot the matte black plates that drew in ambient essence, as well as the radiant power from the sunlight, and converted it into usable anima before channeling it to the town. The train began to move up a ramp as we moved, first racing higher than a house, then the trees, then as tall as the pre-arrival skyscrapers before it began to decelerate, Galena clear on the horizon. As we circled the city and pulled in for our stop, I took the opportunity to look out the window and examine the city from the nearly aerial view. Galena was sometimes called the center of art and history for Oceanseed, and even from such a distance, I could see why. But I personally thought that its other epithet, the city in the sky, was even more fitting. 

The ground in Galena had been wet and loamy for millennia, a part of the same chain of mountains that split off into Arkose and the other smaller ranges, with literal thousands of streams, creeks, rivers, and lakes scattered throughout the range. When hurricanes swept up the coast, many of them would overflow. Records of the pre-arrival culture were spotty at best, but it had been a problem even for them, especially as the world’s weather got weirder and the ocean levels rose. But while I could fault the pre-arrival cultures for many things, one thing I had to give them was that they were exceedingly tenacious. When the places they’d lived had been torn apart by overflowing rivers, they’d put themselves back together. They’d built levies and dams, of course, and as those broke and their homes were destroyed again, they re-built again with a new ethos. 

If they couldn’t be on higher ground, then they’d make their homes and businesses into the higher ground. Their new constructions were raised on supporting poles, standing a dozen feet in the air. That necessitated new walkways, as well as stairways up and down the supports to allow access to the ground.

When magic had returned, a lot of technology had been lost, and a local Obsidian King had risen up in Galena, conquering the city and putting it under its sway. During her reign, half the city’s supports had been inadequately maintained, and the city had partially collapsed. But Obsidian Kings were all destined to fall. They sought power and control over others endlessly, and endless growth is nothing but a cancer that slowly kills its host and then itself. When Oceanseed had overthrown the last of its Obsidian Kings and unified, Galena had been rebuilt. 

Now, Galena truly was a city in the sky. The city was actually built on three levels, as rather than trying to expand outward and destroy the natural environments, they recycled the countless massive piles of waste, scrap metal, and buried livelihoods into usable materials and expanded the town-city-thing upward. Why was it called a town when it had the word city as a part of one of its epithets? I didn’t know. It was probably something to do with population density across its history, but I wasn’t really sure. Nowadays, it had about thirty thousand people, but the area apparently had the capacity for more than fifteen times that. 

But the three concentric rings stacked on top of one another, connected through the occasional pre-arrival skyscrapers, ramps, elevators, stairways, and modern vertical buildings created a very strange feel. It was one that was entirely different from the ancient majesty of the Arkose mountains, the retrofitted skyscrapers of Tourmaline city, or the sleepy peacefulness of my own Syenite village. 

The town almost looked like a stack of three giant bicycle wheels, with lanes of essence-powered movement on the outside forming the wheel, and the innermost roads that headed into the central pillar acting as the spokes. The areas where there wouldn’t be anything on a wheel were instead the living areas, great wedges of townhomes, apartments, restaurants, and more. Of course, even with enchantments to strengthen the metal of the central pillar and the hundreds of supporting pillars, there were practical limits on how much weight steel could support, so there were large wedges of each of the rings that truly were empty. Those gaps had been staggered in such a way that the middle and bottom rings of the city still got a good amount of sunlight while the sun was high in the sky. It wasn’t perfect, of course, and the bottommost part of the city was far and away darker than the top layer, but it was a real effort to promote equality, when the design of the town could so easily have transformed it into 

In that same effort, there were multiple more parks filled with fruit trees and berry bushes on the bottom and middle city slices than there were on the top ones, as well as more lighting. And lighting was everywhere in the town, making the street lamps of Tourmaline feel like nothing more than a candle in the bottom of the ocean. I felt like the entire city had a barely-audible buzz from the conversion from standard null element anima into the much more unusual radiant magics. That radiant magic was being put to use too, filling Galena’s epithet as the center of art and history – something I’d forgotten about entirely, until I’d started researching the town on the way here.  

Everywhere I looked, light had been woven into beautiful displays. I could see recreations of ancient paintings from the Persian golden age, the renaissance period, and the absurdist and cubist movements that had been popular in protest of all three world wars. There were other, more modernist works as well, including a sculpture of hard light that two months ago, I’d have just interpreted as a vague version of a squarrel. Now, though, I could tell that it was a painstaking recreation of a squarrel’s ousia weave after being raised to an effective legendary.  Historical monuments detailing Galena’s history were woven along various avenues, all while water was pumped up from the series of now nearly permanently overflowing rivers up into complex knots and weaves of multicolored art. 

Frankly, I found the entire thing to be a little overwhelming. I knew that my view from the third and highest ring of the town meant that everything looked much closer together than it really was, but the sheer amount of light and color made my brain ache. At least it made sense why Gawain had wanted to go to a concert here, though, since to me the entire city practically felt like a concert. 

With all the enchantments and lights, it was little wonder that the city utilized so many collection panels, with so many magical techniques being maintained at once, and with no essence hearts located in the city itself, they needed to draw in power from over a wide area. That lack of essence hearts also meant that it was the first place I’d visited that was actually lower in ambient essence than my own home. The area I was in felt like it was somewhere in the high level three range, maybe level four. Based on what I’d read about the town over the local network on the train ride here, that was actually on the higher end. The town as a whole had an average ambient essence level of only two. 

“It’s a bit much, isn’t it?” Laurel asked, and I jerked so hard that I actually fell out of the chair where I’d been sitting. She started to cackle, even as I tried to pull myself to my feet, banged my head against the drink tray that had flipped down during my fall, and felt a thin spike of pnuema form around my head to stop it from actually causing real injury. 

“That is absolutely not fair,” I groused, dusting myself off. “How did you sneak up on me?” 

“We didn’t,” River said. He wasn’t laughing nearly as hard as Laurel was, but I could see him working to actively suppress the smile on his face as he picked a bit of gum off my sweatshirt and tossed it into a trash bag. “Your face was just pressed to the window. Half the train’s gotten off in the time you were staring outside.” 

I grumbled something at them, then swung on my backpack and headed to the storage area to collect my bike. I hadn’t gotten a ton of use out of it in Arkose, since the village at the base of the mountains was small enough I mostly just walked. Since I was in a larger town now, I was hopeful that I’d be able to use it again, even if the essence powered lanes were too fast for me. 

“There’s a shop in Calcite city that does a lot of work on bike mods,” River commented as he helped me unload it from the train. 

“That’s where Vince is from, right?” I asked. “And where you got your first seal from Councillor Alyssa Ramos.” 

“Right,” Laurel nodded. “Technological capital of Oceanseed. My village actually did a lot of the recycling of components for it.” 

I made a noise of appreciation, then nodded to River, who continued with what he was saying. 

“If you visit, you should really consider saving up a bit and buying some magitech while you’re in the area. Calcite is probably the cheapest place possible for purchasing anything magitech, given how much the industry thrives in the city, even if things like government-standardized auggear ignore a lot of the esoterica.” 

There was a note of pride in his voice, and I wondered if Pegmatite town – the place River was from – was close to Calcite city. Maybe most of the town was driven by doing the enchantments for auggear or something, in the same way that Laruel’s village recycled scraps.

“Well, as interesting as that is, and I am being genuine when I say that it’s interesting, we’re still pretty far from Calcite,” I said. “In fact, we’re somewhere else entirely. Let’s explore Galena town, look for somewhere to stay. And while I’m here, I am going to get a floating frame for my augpad’s recordings.”

“Speaking of, did you see the comment on our fight video?” Laurel asked, a snorting laugh making the later half of her sentence nearly inaudible. “I can’t believe you’re cheating on your rival.” 

“You’re making that up,” I said, my stomach twisting as she said that. I didn’t know why – the comment was actually pretty funny, given how many fights Gawain had appeared in on my tamer profile. That wasn’t… it…

“Whatever,” I said aloud. “Let’s find a hostel. Rane’s coming to town soon, so I’ll have to put her name down to share the room with me.” 

“Not staying with Gawain?” Laurel asked. I gave her a rude gesture and started walking away from the train station.