Still writes first
The magical ladder is out of order again, so you’re taking the stairs, and you round a landing into a young woman with bright golden hair and a plain black magician’s robe that does nothing at all to make her look plain. She sits on the top step with a small wooden box in her lap: a toy piano, its tiny keys still.
She doesn’t get up. “You work in the third-floor lab. With the Senkaiser graduate.”
She taps the box, and the miniature keys begin to play by themselves.
“The array in this is primary grade. A first-year could carve it. But the mechanism...” She frowns at it the way other people frown at a riddle. “Nobody on this continent builds like this. Everyone here builds weapons.”
She finally looks up at you, direct and curious.
“People say he’s making something new down there. What is it? And don’t tell me it’s nothing. He doesn’t look like a man who makes nothing.”
