Isagi and Cecil rode back from Orario to Solingen on the Unicorn that the little Spirit Yufi turned herself into.
The trip took the better part of a day.
They set out in the morning and reached the place by dusk.
The house where they had once lived with Goddess Astrea was still standing at the edge of the autumn woods. Weeds had overrun the yard, and vines and moss had crept up along the walls. Isagi and Cecil thought about giving the place a cleaning — then remembered they would be leaving again almost at once, and traded a look.
"Maybe we just stay at an inn instead."
"Yes, let's!"
This "Garden of Stars," which had stood for so long in the City of Castings, was well on its way to falling into ruin for good.
After all, they figured they would never be coming back.
Yufi had bolted straight for the depths of the forest the moment they arrived, off to find her Spirit friends without a backward glance, so they left her to it. The two of them rested for a while, then set off toward the main city district in the distance.
The city came into sight all at once, unchanged from before, forever breathing out its shimmering heat.
The soaring chimneys of the forging workshops never once fell idle, and the closer they came, the louder that endless clang and clatter of hammers grew.
Following the letter Alfia had sent them.
Isagi and Cecil found the woman in a corner of the city's commercial district, in a small, reasonably quiet restaurant on a second floor.
She was clearly in the middle of a meal.
When she saw him and the girl come in, she pushed the menu across and remarked that the perch and the mutton curry were good.
Neither of them had ever been here before — the place seemed new, or at least neither of them had noticed it in the past — so they took her recommendation and ordered the "safe bet."
It really was good.
Alfia said nothing whatsoever while she ate, and ate with such gravity that she gave off a distinctly old-fashioned severity.
She cleared every last scrap of food without a crumb out of place, taking small bites yet moving at a startling pace; by the time Isagi and Cecil finished, she had long since been ready to stand and leave.
"Let's go," Alfia said, plainly meaning to take the two of them somewhere. The destination was not far — she had most likely chosen lodgings nearby on purpose.
They wound their way through the clamor of the commercial district, ducked into a narrow alley, kept walking, and finally arrived deep in a back lane at a shop with its doors shut tight, the whole place as closed off and gloomy as the Dungeon.
It was so well hidden that no one but an old acquaintance would ever think to call.
Isagi worked it out quickly enough: this was a witch's shop.
Inside, it resembled the "Witch's Hideaway" back in Orario, the one he had visited with Miss Riveria — a broad space that looked to have been converted out of a cellar, thick with some strange medicinal fragrance.
Odd flowers and herbs stood along every wall of the roomy shopfront, along with wind chimes and ornaments that looked something like cloth dolls.
The glass case beside the counter held rows of bottles and jars, and a number of splendid gemstones.
He saw none of the stranger "materials" — no eyeballs, no Monster entrails, nothing of that sort. Presumably it had all been put away.
The interesting part was this: the one behind the counter was no old woman, but a little girl in an enormous hat.
Timid, eight or nine years old by the look of her, a few freckles scattered across a clean, pale little face, and she never quite dared to turn those amber-brown eyes toward Isagi or Alfia.
"Welcome, please come i— ah! Miss Alfia! And these are the friends you told me about...?"
"Mm."
Alfia clearly knew her well. Much the way Miss Riveria knew that witch called Lenoa.
Only afterward did Isagi learn that the one Alfia was actually acquainted with was this girl Heidi's master, who happened to be away travelling just then, which left the apprentice alone to mind the shop.
That did not make her a soft touch, though.
The moment they arrived, her face went dead serious — a great deal like Cecil's, in fact — cheeks puffed with concentration as she brought out, with enormous care, the Magic Stones the woman had collected from the Desert of Death.
They sat in a glass jar, steeped in a liquid of dazzling color.
The Magic Stones were so fine they were almost impossible to make out, yet the instant the little witch Heidi drew them free, everyone present — even Cecil — could feel it plainly: inside those tiny specks lay some kind of "Strength."
"Big Sister Alfia's judgment was right. This Magic Stone— no, every stone you brought back, all of them have changed to some degree."
"Changed?"
"Mm-hm! What exactly happened is still unknown, but there really is a strange Strength inside them."
Changed Magic Stones. That set Isagi thinking of the Monsters warped by the Corrupted Spirit — the enormous Violas, the deadly venomous green worms, and the "Jewel Fetus" that could parasitize Monsters, adventurers, even gods.
Even now, the Guild's research into those mutated Magic Stones had gone nowhere. The only thing they could confirm was that the things seemed to possess some ability to "siphon" the Dungeon's Strength directly.
The strange part was that they had to root themselves in a "plant" to do it, feeding on the Dungeon like something drawing up nutrients.
But the Magic Stone in front of them displayed a property of an entirely different kind.
[Diffusion].
Heidi lifted the tiny stone out of the glass jar with a pair of slender metal tweezers, then fetched a small potted plant from the display case behind the counter.
And then—
The instant the Magic Stone touched those green leaves, they all watched the tender foliage slowly wither, and then... disappear.
Disappear utterly.
The way a Monster scatters into ash once it loses its Magic Stone, the leaves crumbled away into ash beneath the touch of that one small stone.
Then came something more uncanny still. As the leaves vanished, faint motes of Magic began to well up around the stone — and because they were simply left drifting in the open air, they dispersed entirely a moment later.
Isagi grasped what that meant right away.
The Magic Stone in front of him could "contaminate" everything around it, and then convert it into "Magic."
And by Alfia's account, the stone's "Diffusion" was absolute. Setting aside living people and animals, soil, trees, rivers — anything at all would vanish because of it, and be turned into Magic.
Why?
There was no answer to that.
The little witch carefully eased the stone back into its dedicated glass jar.
"In a sense, it does explain the Desert of Death's [Enlargement] — why it swallows more ground every year."
Those minute stones gnawed ceaselessly at the land along the desert's edge, turning it, little by little, into part of the desert itself.
"That isn't the point."
Alfia said it in complete earnest. The point, all along, was why Magic should appear at all.
Was it a conversion? Or something far deeper than that?
The Magic Kingdom had plainly noticed the same thing and was already conducting research of its own — so how far had they gotten?
And it was not only Alfia thinking of it. Isagi found himself remembering those earlier rumors about the Magic Kingdom's "ultimate weapon." Could it be tied directly to the stone sitting here in front of them?
____
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