Find the continent’s most fertile land, realise it’s smack in the middle of two major settlements, and on it slap a community founded on an idea of industriousness extreme to the point of performativity that owed most of its wealth to trading. If one were to give this mix a few generations to stew, they would be given front rows to an ever-degenerating show where notions of success came to be equated to notions of intrinsically good moral character, and therefore lack of success with intrinsically bad moral character. Add transactional elements to community life, and those who would need support the most would have ended up being unable to afford help and participation in community.

One day, the pockets of disenfranchisement within the city of Provo would grow to full ripeness, and Mikkel promised himself that he would be there for the harvest, or even just the gathering, as there was no need for him to lift so much as a finger if all he wanted was a piece of fruit to bite into. Still, it was a truth most ancient that intervention begot efficiency. It was in fact older than farming itself, if only due to the domestication of animals preceding even that as far as his world was concerned.

You had to choose your soil wisely, and your seeds and the time of the sowing even more so. Once in a while, weed out all that would get in the way of the final goal, and seize the moment when the time of the harvest comes. Garden and fields both would see the process to completion in months-long cycles. An empire, a kingdom, or even a city – past a certain size, there was no real difference – would take years, or perhaps even decades. Still, Mikkel could wait, for the building up to the Moment was nearly as enjoyable to him as the Moment itself: the moment where he would strike a match alight and toss it into the powder keg…

…Which wasn’t an agricultural metaphor at all, but the main point remained: fuck Provo, eventually.

It was not yet the Moment. It was rather a time of maintenance, a time of checking one’s garden for pests and weeds and diseased plants to prune and to root out. He was walking the streets of a densely populated area in the outskirts of Provo, inhabited mostly by seasonal migrants and labourers. They were rowdy streets, if not truly quite chaotic yet, for it was market day and one had to slalom through the crowd.

He chose that day on purpose: while the cloak he was wearing concealed most of his features, and a mask on his skull made him appear to be a bespectacled, moustached elderly man with a very prominent nose, it was in large numbers that one would find real invisibility. Of course, it was also in large numbers that one was most likely to find something interesting to observe.

Such as a man calling out for Bahamut, the Dragon King. A fairly large group of people had collected around his stall, so he could not quite see his face from there, but then a roar tore the very air and made it so that where one had to look was up, at the sky, well above the crowd and certainly well above the man.

It would have been inaccurate to say that, to Mikkel’s surprise, there really was a dragon up there. In fact, Mikkel was not surprised at all: you didn’t call out to people like that if you didn’t have a show to give, and the dragon was there alright. However, what he did not quite get was why. Why, exactly, anybody would think that the best way to use such power – or to convince others that he was using such a power – was to display it as the main piece of some sort of freakshow.

Perhaps, Mikkel thought, it was a form of religious fervour, though the tone didn’t seem to suggest it. A more plausible explanation was that the poor bastard was attempting to convince people that they, too, could end up possessing Bahamut’s power if only they were willing to part ways with just enough bucks.

He observed silently, but most importantly, he listened. He listened not to the roars or the fluttering of wings, but to the heckler who had just appeared on the scene. It took Mikkel all of three seconds to dismiss the thought that he too must have been part of the gig. Three seconds was all it took for the stall owner’s face to twist from surprise to indignation and barely suppressed anger as the dragon landed again. It was hardly bigger than a cat.

Having seen enough, Mikkel snapped his fingers, and a blinding light flashed on the crowd, followed by a loud crash. When the people opened their eyes again, they saw a stall split in half and no dragon to speak of. Mikkel calculated that it would take them a few seconds to fully process what had just happened, stall owner included, and with the small dragon now flailing helplessly under his right arm, he followed the heckler away from the centre of the action, half-walking and half-jogging until he caught up with him.

“Say, kid, how come do you sound like you’re so familiar with Bahamut you might as well have had him over for tea, yet appear to have never been in a place with more than a dozen civilians in it at a time including family dinners?” He said. “You say the stuff you’ve just said in a place like Torensten, and you get your portrait in the next day’s bulletin next to a comment about the dumbest lynching victim of the decade, which while I would find hilarious, I suspect it would be robbing the world – and me – of some far more worthwhile entertainment, soldier.”

Ah, a new one. Fresh off the Rift, as some might put it. One could not possibly be ignorant of one of the biggest cities on the whole continent otherwise, even without having to know its customs. At the same time, nobody in their right mind would ever mention personal acquaintance with the Bahamut so casually in a conversation with a – no, scratch “a”, it was really several strangers. Not that, Mikkel determined, there must have ever been much going on in there in the social graces department. A rare flash from the distant and ever-dimming star of his own social self-awareness made him nearly recoil at the thought that such a critique was coming from him.

Still, it was a specific name – a toponym, as a matter of fact – that drew most of his attention: Valisthea. For somewhere that was certainly not in his own world nor on Zephon, it rang a bell. Valisthea. Mikkel plunged in the lake of recollection and searched for memories of past reads and past conversations, and while a mind unbeholden to mortal limits was not prone to memory lapses, a life of sixteen hundred years contained a significant number of memories and experiences. Yet, the mechanism stayed the same, therefore for it to ring a bell like that must have meant that it was a relatively recent memory… Ah!

“So they do,” Mikkel agreed with the kind of tone very elderly men with their hands perpetually behind their back used when commenting the inevitability of bad weather. He, for one, had never seen a dragon – dragons, not drakes – charge into battle alongside those who, as far as he could tell, were humans, least of all Bahamut. Only the most powerful of summoners could even hope to perform such a feat, but then he already knew that was not the case there. If there was a Dominant of Odin, and he’d met him already, there was no reason to think there could not be a Dominant of Bahamut. And it was not that kid.

“Terence,” he repeated, if only to fill in the silence as he searched his mental vocabulary for a name that was not his own. He looked for a name fitting for Provo, the city of profit, a city where no self-respecting inhabitant would ever be caught staying still, a city of riches and of widening class divides. A city that breathed invoices…

He extended a hand that no amount of padding in his gloves could have made anything more substantial than thin. “Brambilla,” he ventured uncertainly. “Brambilla Fumagalli, and yes, yes I mind, I appreciate you asking.”

Sir Terence