It was late-afternoon when Elise stepped outside her shop onto the streets of Windhaven. Windhaven was the capital city of Raliec and had all the troublesome bustle and busyness that accompanied being a capital. Even as it grew into evening people still hurried about the place, determined and focused. This was 'the lows' though, a district of the city located at the bottom of the hill that the city occupied and enjoyed the distinct privilege of having all the filth from the gutters of the higher districts flow down into it. It was not a pleasant place to be. It was also one of the most populated places in the city as the streams of people moving about attested to.
There wasn't much magic being used. There was some people were using it to move heavy loads and clean buildings but the population of the lows as a whole tended to have short lines and couldn't summon much magic. Most saved their magic to earn a living. Here and there in the crowd, there were people with burn scars around their eyes and their fingers. None were as extreme as the set that Elise carried though.
She was well used to moving through crowds and was not shy about getting people to move out of her way via a jab from her elbow. She made her way quickly through the streets, not that she had very far to go in the first place. The southern gate was at most two blocks from her shop. Past the southern gate, the city officially stopped. The main road into the city was clear but aside from that the outside of the southern gate was crowded with a maze of tents, makeshift shelters, shacks and shallow burrows. The law stated that no building would be built on lands surrounding the city without proper authorisation from the city's lord. But the poor and desperate found a loophole; the law excluded temporary structures. So this maze was constantly rearranging, shifting and growing as the inhabitants tore down where they lived and set it up again somewhere else. It seemed like every week it expanded and every day it changed. She knew there were the occasional struggles and feuds over the best spots to build, the driest places, the places with easier access to potable water. It was nothing new to her. These were Windhaven's slums and she'd spent some time here when she first came to Windhaven. Living in a ragged tent was not as bad as it could be. There were worse ways to live.
The line was rather starkly revealing in what it told the world about a person's magical potency and how much they could store but not everything was so obvious. A small number of people were what were called 'readers'. Everyone could feel their own spell thread as if it was part of them but readers could sense the spell thread of others. It was exactly rare but nor was it common but there was no external evidence of the ability, there was no way to know if someone was a reader or not. About one in twenty people were readers. However, they did tend to get drawn to a few professions where their talents would uniquely shine such as healers or focus craftsmen. It was a potent ability if used right. Elise was using it to navigate the confusing haphazard layout of the slums.
Coming to a small freshly built shack she knocked gently on its walls. A curtain had been hung over the doorway in place of an actual door. A man stuck his head out past the curtain and on seeing Elise he grinned. He wore simple and cheap clothes. He was also rather cleaner than you'd expect a slum dweller to be.
"Well, that was fast. I wasn't expecting to see you for a while," he said while gesturing for her to come in. "And I was expecting to have to go pick it up I didn't think you'd deliver it,"
"I was able to get through a few more orders than I was I expecting to and I got to yours a little earlier than scheduled and since I was free I thought I'd drop it over," she replied.
The inside of the shack was comprised of two very small rooms. One was a bedroom with two beds and no space to stand and the other was a cramped kitchen with no place to sit. Aside from some shelves in the kitchen, there was no furniture for storage, there simply wasn't room instead things were put in bags and tied to the ceiling. There was a young boy sitting on one of the beds, aged about ten. His line was noticeably longer than his father's. In fact, it was longer than the line of most people out in the slums. Elise could read the layout of the wand he held from the door of the shack.
It was in terrible condition. Making a custom focus took time and effort from a skilled craftsman, which it meant it took money, usually, it took a fairly hefty chunk of money. The poor resorted to second-hand wands, hand me downs, cheap wands made by apprentices for practice and on occasion stolen wands to get by. Using a focus ill-suited to the width of your spell thread would damage the focus. If the thread was too small the gates could fail and get burnt out. If it was too wide, well the spell thread would need to be forced down the channels it couldn't fit down causing unintended 'burning' It would burn unevenly causing cavities to form in the channels, which would catch the spell thread causing it to snag on the cavity. Which in turn would further 'burn' the cavity wider possibly till it breached another channel ruining the wand. This was exactly what had happened with the child's wand.
His father called him over.
"This is Elise, you remember her don't you? I think she has something for you"
The kid merely nodded shyly in response. Pulling out a short sturdy stick from one of her many pockets she presented the child with a new wand. It was new, varnished, sturdy and well suited to him. His eyes lit upon seeing it. He had it in his hands in a blink and was soon casting lifting spells one the bed he had been sitting on moments before. He had a manic grin on his face as the big piece of furniture rose into the air.
"It's got channels for kinetic effects, like lifting spells and kinetic shield spells, heat effects, light effects, all the usual household stuff and some stone shaping," Elise explained.
"That's a lot of stuff you were able to squeeze into it. Sounds like it can do lots more than mine can,"
"Not really, it's a basic wand with basic effects, I could potentially have put far more things into the wand but having more spell types can make it more complicated to use. It's a problem that can be mitigated with good wand design but never completely overcome. The more choices offered the more gates there are and the more the user needs to understand in order to use it. For a wand for a child, it was better to keep it simple,"
"Well thanks, I was worried I'd never get him something he could use and he'd have to join his old man doing odd jobs to make ends meet. Now he can actually properly cast some spells he'll have better prospects than I ever did that's for sure,"
He pulled out an iron box, the way the contents rattled told Elise just what was inside even before he handed it to her. When she checked its contents, however, her brow furrowed.
"This is more than we negotiated,"
He looked at her with prideful eyes.
"I know how much something like that wand is worth. It's far more than you asked for and is still nowhere close to what is in that box. I pay my dues, always,"
That same stubbornness, she'd seen it many times before in many different people. If she didn't take this box here, he'd come by her shop later and leave it on the counter or hand it to her again and insist that she take it.
"This is all your savings," It wasn't a question.
She'd known too many people like him before for it to be a question. His eyes turned back to his son as the kid tested his new wand and all the possibilities it opened up for him. He responded with only two words and a smile;
"Worth it,"
