Within an hour I had finished every piece of meat Arvid had brought for me. We travelled the remaining two hours in considerably more comfortable silence, and by the time the carriage slowed, we had reached Fonta.
We had departed Arpa through the southern gate — not the northern one we had entered through after crossing the Grand Sand Desert. Arpa had four gates in total: north, south, east, and west, each one guarded by its own garrison unit. The walls were patrolled hourly without exception. Defence was something the Selonian people did not treat as an afterthought.
The view beyond the southern gate was nothing like what I had expected. Instead of sand and the parched, sun-scorched signs of desertification I had grown accustomed to, there was green. Grasslands rolled outward from either side of the road, stretching as far as I could see in every direction. Here and there, a lone tree or a small cluster of them rose from the earth, accompanied by man-made wooden pavilions erected to offer shade from the violence of the sun. A wooden fence ran along both sides of the wide gravel road, clearly placed to keep something off the path.
Something that became apparent as we continued south. Countless sheep and lambs dotted the grasslands in every direction, scattered across the land like stars flung carelessly across a night sky, a few human figures moving slowly among them. The further we travelled, the more varied the livestock became. Near a winding stream, cows and water buffaloes grazed at the banks.
The gravel road eventually met a wooden bridge built across the stream that divided the grassland. Smaller bridges had been constructed at intervals along the water for the convenience of the cowherds and shepherds working the land on either side.
It was an ecosystem entirely its own.
The water buffaloes were new to me. I watched, genuinely transfixed, as one waded into the stream with complete ease, submerged itself, and swam beneath the bridge to emerge on the other side. I stared after it.
Those heavy, enormous creatures could swim. The concept felt entirely foreign to me.
Arvid followed my gaze and let it rest there alongside mine.
"Fascinating, aren't they?" he said.
I nodded, though I still couldn't quite look away.
"Most of the land between here and Fonta is grassland," he continued. "Even in Fonta itself, people choose animal husbandry over farming. Past Fonta, though, it becomes farmland as far as the eye can see." He gestured loosely at the stream. "Both Arpa and Fonta people share this space. Fonta people tend to use the land south of the stream. Arpa people, the land north of it."
"Have there been disputes over it?" I asked. The division seemed a little too deliberate to have come about peacefully.
"Some," he admitted. "Many of the animal farmers in Arpa originally came from Fonta. After settling inside the city walls, certain of them began to carry themselves as though that made them something different — something above where they came from. The Fonta people resented it, as you'd expect. And of course, not everyone can live inside Arpa. Tensions are mutual." He paused. "There have been verbal disputes over the years. It has rarely turned violent."
"This arrangement," he added, with the dry pragmatism I had come to recognise as distinctly his, "is the best solution we managed to arrive at short of letting them kill each other."
We crossed the bridge and continued south along the gravel road. The eye-easing scenery unfolded beside us for some time, until sparse houses began to appear, spread across the grassland at wide intervals. A few miles further, and those houses thickened into the dense, lively settlement of Fonta proper.
The roadsides were lined with market stalls — vendor after vendor calling out over one another, displaying wheels of cheese, clay pots of yoghurt and curd, pale jugs of milk, and cuts of meat both fresh and preserved. Honey-cured strips, salt-cured parcels, and dried meat hung in neat rows. The crowd moving through them wasn't Fonta people — they had the look of merchants and travelling caravans resupplying before the long road south. Some loaded up on preserved meats and dairy. Others purchased raw meat and fresh milk in bulk.
Those latter ones puzzled me, and Arvid seemed to notice.
"Fonta is where most travelling merchants source their animal products," he explained, "because inside Arpa's merchant district, those same goods cost considerably more. Many of them are heading far south — past Rutia and Julam, all the way down to Turga, where they can ship the goods for the best profit." He nodded toward the buyers carrying raw meat and milk. "Those ones are likely from Rutia or Julam themselves. Both villages are an hour or two south from here. They'll sell what they've bought in their own markets — rice farming is what they have most of, so they trade the surplus for what they lack."
Past the animal stalls, a few wagons appeared selling rice, potatoes, and vegetables to the villagers — the other side of the same exchange.
"Rutia or Julam," Arvid said simply, as we passed them.
At the far edge of the village, the road split. One branch continued due south; the other, narrower and barely more than a suggestion in the ground, curved east. We took the eastern path. Within a few miles, the village dissolved behind us along a treeline, and the open grassland gave way to sparse woods — not dense by any measure, but enough to close in on both sides of the road. The further we went, the more the path narrowed, until it felt less like a road and more like a trail that had not known regular use in a long while. The carriage slowed, then stopped.
"We go on foot from here," Arvid said, stepping out.
He reached back and took my twitching arm, steadying me as I climbed down.
Once outside, I saw it.
The trail veered away from its eastern course and climbed a small hill to the north — and at the crest of that hill, rising against the sky with a certainty that seemed to belong to a different age entirely, stood an enormous tower. It didn't merely stand tall. It seemed to pierce the sky itself, as though it had been built by people who considered the heavens a reasonable ambition.
The High Tower of Fonta.
I drew a slow breath. The air here was clean in a way Arpa's wasn't — cool and unhurried, filling my lungs and carrying away the fatigue of the journey, replacing it with something that felt almost like clarity. I nudged Arvid forward without a word.
We began the climb. The trail was overgrown, the grass having crept back across the path until it stood nearly as tall as we did. Arvid drew his sword and moved ahead, cutting a way through with long, measured strokes.
"Herders don't come here," he said, not breaking his rhythm. "They consider the tower a bad omen. Only the occasional curious traveller, or children daring each other to get close. Once we're settled, I'll have this path formally restricted — no one should stumble across this place by accident."
I walked behind him, thinking. If I were to become a dragon inside the very tower the Fonta people already feared as a bad omen, then their superstitions would turn out to be more accurate than they knew. I felt a small, absurd pang of guilt for them. But it was what it was. Perhaps this place had been waiting for exactly this — and perhaps I had been making my way here since long before I ever knew it.
The top of the hill arrived before I expected it to.
From below, the hill had looked modest. But standing at its crest, I understood how deceptive it was. To the east, the land fell away sharply into a cliff overlooking wide farmland far below. The western face of the hill was just as steep, near-impossible to climb without knowing exactly where to put your feet. And directly behind the tower, the view opened wide — the full spread of Fonta village in one direction, the generous sweep of the grasslands in the other. It was breathtaking in the quiet, unhurried way of things that don't need to announce themselves.
A small detail caught my eye: a spring welling at the foot of the hill, thin and quiet on its own, but tracing a path downward to where two other springs joined it. The stream that had divided the grasslands, the one the wooden bridges crossed, the one where the water buffaloes had swum — it began here.
I hadn't expected that.
I turned around.
The tower took up most of the hilltop, vast in a way that became harder to grasp the closer you stood to it. Looking up from its base, I couldn't see where it ended. Its walls were thick stone, weathered by centuries but unbroken — the people who built it had intended for it to last. A pair of enormous metal doors stood at the entrance, still shut, still holding.
Inside those walls, I was going to become a dragon.
I stood there for a moment, looking up at it.
Then Arvid's hand found mine — fingers careful around my still-twitching ones — and it was time to go in.