Graystone City stood among the hills of the Wizard World's Northern Territory. Its walls were low, their gray-white stones covered in withered vines.
The houses within were low and densely packed, and the narrow streets wound between them, paved with flagstones worn smooth and shiny by the years.
There were no gloomy towers of a wizard academy here, no gray-black sky like that over the Eternal Night Graveyard, only ordinary cooking smoke and ordinary human voices.
The place was remote and unremarkable. Though it was a town in the Wizard World, Wizard Apprentices were rarely seen here, let alone Formal Wizards.
It was in this small town that Field and his wife, Sara, had settled fourteen years earlier.
Sara had also been an apprentice at the Bone Spire. Her talent had been detected when she was ten, and she had entered the academy, spending nearly ten years at the Withered Bone Spire Academy.
Over those ten years, she had seen more than enough scheming: apprentices framing one another for contribution points, Formal Wizards fighting openly and covertly over resources, and mentors using apprentices as expendable materials for their research projects.
Her talent was poor, her family ordinary. With no backing and no connections, she could only live cautiously, caught in the middle.
She disliked the place, but she had no other choice.
Outside the academy, she would be nothing more than a low-ranking apprentice with no background, resources, or influence. She would never survive in the Wizard World.
Besides... the academy would not let a valuable piece of "expendable material" leave without a reason.
Then she met Field.
Field had just finished studying under Gregor at the time. He was young, sweet-tongued, and shameless.
Dressed in a flashy wizard's robe, he struck up a conversation with Sara at a stall