Saila is standing outside Terabeth’s tent when he jogs up.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says, immediately holding out the bun he bought her earlier as a peace offering. She doesn’t look particularly angry though, just sleepy and a little worried. Her backpack is gone- she’s likely tucked it and Thomm’s money into her inventory. He’s getting the impression that hers is much larger than his just based on how little regard she has for shoving things in and out of there— his own currently feels just about bursting at the seams. “I got recognized by somebody and they had some questions about the Leaping Guard.”

“Not a great ordeal, I hope. What’s this?” She asks, looking over his offering with a flickering blink. Bastion wonders if it would be inappropriate to mention the other vampire.

“Seed bun,” he says, deciding he won’t mention it. What’s the point?

“I was worried you had gotten lost after all,” she admits, holding up her palm to push it back at him. “You have it. I don’t eat much. I’m not hungry.”

“Hm,” Bastion says, still holding it out, but she pushes it toward him again. He gives up and starts to pick it apart and chew it down. “Did you win against the lady Terabeth?”

“One doesn’t win a business negotiation,” Saila huffs, but then she gives him a little side-glance and maybe the barest, stingiest hint of a smile. “But if one were to, then I certainly did.”

“I wish I’d seen it,” Bastion says in between chewy bites. He thinks he might have some seeds stuck in his goatee based on how Saila is looking at him.

“It’s pretty boring, so you probably don’t. What did you get up to, aside from being accosted by the public and smearing food on your face?”

“I got accused of being a counterfeiter,” Bastion says, which rather gratifyingly makes Saila laugh. He reaches up and ruffles his goatee, combing his fingers through it to loosen any crumbs.

“The egalitarian nature of suspicion can’t be overlooked.” She nods at him as he tips his face this way and that toward her; all clean. He starts to pat himself back into shape.

“Words to live by,” Bastion agrees, falling into step with her as she peels away from the vegetable stall. She seems to have a goal, and he’s happy to follow after her as she pursues it. He finishes the bun in a few more snaps, then sets to work licking the sticky candied coating off his thumbs and forefingers, using his teeth when that fails.

“Terabeth also mentioned that a tribe of wood-deer have come to the Western woods, just past the bridge,” Saila says. She pauses to look out over the Northern Sister as they start to cross one the long walkways that makes up the Western sky market. She pauses, glancing this way and that. Bastion presumes she’s judged the flow of the crowd and found it acceptable to stop walking; she sets her hands on the stone railing at the edge of the walkway and hops up a little to peer over the edge.

Stacked up vertically, crossing every which way, and just generally making a nuisance of themselves, Bastion had never really appreciated the sky bridges of the market before. He’s always found the walkways and stairways silly, dangerous for the citizens that couldn’t fly and inconvenient for the Leaping Guard to navigate due to their lack of landing spots.

Now, grounded as he is, he’s starting to see the charm: there’s a certain breathless awe to walking up a flight of stairs and ending up on a bridge suspended hundreds of pixels above the water, nothing between you and death but a bit of stone. It feels like the moment when he’s just leapt out from the top of a building, like that eternal moment in time when he’s sailing in the air and still going up.

“It’s a good view,” Bastion says, unnecessarily in his opinion. Saila continues looking out, lifting a hand to shade her eyes against the sun. As she does, he notices again how dark the shadows under her eyes are, how pale and washed-out her skin is. He’d assumed it was a vampire thing, but now he’s seen that other vampire he doesn’t think it is. There’s a peculiar frailty to her at times, something like a flame guttering in the dark right before it goes out, that makes him want to secure her in a lantern and keep her from strong drafts. He also gets the distinct impression that she’d ‘accidentally’ elbow him straight into infertility if he ever said as much to her.

“I’ve never left the city,” she says, still looking out at the western forest. She’s got a serious, somewhat wistful expression on her face.

“Me neither,” Bastion says. “But I’m surprised you haven’t. You’ve been here since the city was founded, right?” So about two hundred years, give or take.

“Right at the end of the war,” she agrees. Bastion looks out over the endless jumble of green to the west, trying to see if he can decide what she’s looking at. If Bastion squints, he thinks he can just see the landing of the ambitious moonshot that is the western bridge right before it tucks under the canopy of the forest.

“Were you born here?” He asks, but that doesn’t make sense, does it? The city had been empty, barren of all structures and buildings but for the underdepths and the Ivory Spires, according to records from the time. Saila had mentioned that her building was put up before the battle of the Two Kings. Perhaps she had been born in the tent cities that refugees first settled in, but…. She’d spoken about it as if she’d been there alongside the original founder of her shop, not as a babe-in-arms but as an experienced, observing eye. The question of Saila’s birth, Bastion realizes, also raises the question of how she became a vampire.

“I was not,” Saila says, turning to face him with a pinch to her mouth. He sees her fingers tense on the stone railing and resigns himself to a mystery unsolved: she’s more close-mouthed than some gangsters’ wives he’s arrested, and he doesn’t want to make things bitter between them again when they’re about to cross into the Spires. Speaking of which…

“I got you something,” he says, fumbling through his inventory rows and edging out the long, gleaming silver scissors he’d picked up.

“I have scissors at the shop. I do own a shop specializing in fabric trade,” she says, pursing her lips. Her hands come up to ward it off.

“Glad to hear you have your entire shop at hand at any moment,” Bastion replies with an exasperated sigh, rolling his neck. It cracks satisfyingly. Saila blinks owlishly before turning back to look at the forest. “The Spires are dangerous. I figured you’d turn down a knife, but a good pair of shears can do the job just as well.”

“Not a lantern?” She asks with palpable skepticism, setting her chin in her hands and looking at him from the corner of her eyes. The wind coming up from the river ruffles her hair like a fond hand.

“The Spires are dark as a body inside,” Bastion says, surprised at her question. She’d said herself that she sends her requests for glass to the Spires, who then pass them on to the Foundry. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might not even step foot into the place. “No light can penetrate its marrow. We won’t be going far inside, anyway— there’s an archivist that acts as the intermediary between the academics and the rest of the world.”

“Oh, that’s incredibly reassuring,” Saila says, looking so immediately relieved that she seems to swoon a bit. “The archivist bit, not the part where the interior of the Spires defy all laws of nature. That bit is deeply unwelcome. Downright unwholesome, actually.”

“Just take the shears and come on,” Bastion says, jerking his head at the distant loom of the Spires through the smog of the city skyline. “I want to be in and out before it gets dark.”

“Have you ever been there when it’s past sunset?” Saila asks, hopping down from her perch on the stone railway to trot after him.

“No,” Bastion says gruffly, “and I really don’t want to be.”

“Interesting,” she comments in a tickled, pleasant tone, which Bastion feels is a bit daring coming from a cloth merchant with the temperament of a small angry lizard.

Like the underdepths, the Ivory Spires were, according to all records, present from the start, as people fled and tents rose and the Demon always, always advanced.

Unlike the underdepths, though, the Ivory Spires jut off from the island almost halfway to the western shore, connected to the city only by a series of ironwork bridges built over the years. In the old days, the Spires had only been reachable by boat, and with good reason in Bastion’s opinion.

At the origins of the city the Spires had been used as a place to store dangerous magical leftovers. Mages died in the Great War just the same as the rest of the people, and as the war dragged on they started to die in higher numbers. Some of the mages had the foresight to box up their monstrosities and experiments, to chain their sentient bestiaries and swaddle the nightmares made flesh they had summoned to fight the Demon and its Spawn. A great deal, though, had not, either due to negligence or the sheer, simple fact that nobody expects to die.

It was with great relief that other cities sent their orphaned magical items to the Spires to be contained after the Great War. Books arrived by the boatful, cages in the dark of night, and through it all the spires had stood impassively, their surfaces white and pitted like coral writ large. The spires, even as they hummed with activity, were devoid of windows or ventilation or cook smoke— indeed, devoid of any sign of life whatsoever.

To this day the Spires slice up through the waters of the Southern Sister like the fangs of some dead beast laid down to rot. Birds refuse to land on them, barnacles fail to attach, and fish stay away. Ships navigate around them rather than scissoring between their enormous bases, not because of any precedent of danger but because of superstition. Bastion doesn’t find that quite so foolish as he should.

Of course, the Ivory Spires had collected more than just books in the aftermath of the war. Mages, worn thin by the bloodshed of the front lines and desperate for the quiet lives they had once had, flocked to the Spires. That the mages themselves never again emerged at first seemed a point of great concern by all accounts; over time, though, everybody seems to have accepted that as birds fly and fish swim, mages with academic interests journey to the City of the Two Kings and vanish into the Spire, never to be seen again except in the faintest, barest flicker of a Shadow sent out to do work.

Bastion has never really been able to understand if fresh-faced mages coming to the Spires think that they, somehow, will be the special ones to emerge victorious where all others have failed. Perhaps the whole point of the thing is to submerge oneself in the Ivory Spires, to sacrifice yourself and never again surface. Perhaps that’s even part of the attraction, the idea that once in, you never again have to face the world again.

On further reflection, Bastion realizes, until he makes up his mind about his own job he can’t really talk.

At night lights in all colors sometimes flicker from the Spire where it rests under the water, and that’s no rumor: Bastion has seen it and wondered at it. Sometimes on new moons, too, the reflection will go wrong and show the Spires with windows in infinite spirals up, and uncountable flames in those windows. There’s always been some debate about the reflections from the new moon— some say there are people in there, too, but others say that it’s just the splash of the river current, or fish, or riverweed twining long and deceptive under the surface.

Bastion’s never spent too much time worrying about the Spires, unlike some of his peers. They’ve always been there, he figures, and they always will be. They’ve always gobbled up those who come to them, always sent out Shadows in the place of their devoured mages to do what work is requested of them. The Ivory Spires are a fixture of the city, yet another unique mark that makes it so notable, so special, a place that pulls in the attention of the world.

Doesn’t mean he has to like them.

As they make their way along the long, magically-suspended ironwork bridge toward the central Spire, Bastion realizes there’s a figure storming their way, coming away from the entranceway in tight, seething stalk that sets off alarm bells at the back of his mind.

“Do the Spires normally get so many visitors?” Saila asks, looking up at him inquisitively. She’s got the scissors stuck in her inventory, which isn’t Bastion’s favorite location for a weapon. Still, she clearly has more finesse with managing that sort of thing than he does, so he’d left it to her discretion. Right now, he’s contemplating telling her to have them out and at the ready.

“Almost never,” he says, taking his hands from his pockets to rest them easily at his sides, where he can draw his rapier if need be. He adjusts his stride to stand just a little in front of Saila.

As they draw closer to each other, the figure resolves into a fine-boned woman of what Bastion might have considered small stature prior to meeting Saila. She’s got a tangled mess of hair piled up on her head and an angry, toothsome snarl taking up what seems like an unusually large portion of her face. She has a shepherd’s crook in flatly matte black metal strapped to her back, which seems to capture Saila’s interest: she immediately steps forward to get a better look. Bastion sticks out an arm and keeps her behind him, half expecting to get an elbow for his caution.

“Spires open for business?” Bastion calls when the woman is about an arm’s width away.

“Closed,” she snaps in a clipped Northern accent, pacing on past them with an almost-palpable chill dogging her heels. Her boots clatter on the bridge noisily.

Bastion puts his hand down, safely resting away from his rapier. They walk on in silence for a bit more before Saila pops up to her position next to him again.

“I don’t think I’d let her in for a visit either,” Saila rattles off conversationally, and the idea of Saila, insular picky Saila, sitting down for tea with an unpleasant stranger is so funny that Bastion shouts out a laugh before he can help it.

“Shit,” he says, turning back to look and see if the figure has heard them, and he doesn’t even care that he’s sworn in front of Saila as he does it.