BOOK I: SAILOR'S RISE

  The Path of a Collector

  Asleep

  Awakened

  Ascendant

  Transcendent

  Divine

  The Once Five Great Schools

  The Terra Magma School

  The Silver Sanctum School

  The Valshynar School

  The Four Winds School

  The Serpent Moon School

  Designations in the Trader’s Guild

  Unincorporated companies (unlimited)

  Incorporated companies (unlimited)

  Sitting companies (one hundred eligible)

  Council companies (ten eligible)

  Council chair (one eligible)

  PROLOGUE

  When Lucia Fisher finally admitted to herself that she was dying, she knew she needed a plan. Time had been an ocean ever since the day her husband died—impossibly wide, dangerously deep, and entirely directionless—but rather than sink, she had built a raft. For a decade now, she had been building that raft for her and her son. It gave her a goal, a renewed sense of purpose, something to hold her focus as the white-hot sun beat down upon her neck, as the flat horizon failed to ever return her stolen spouse, as the cold, reminding water splashed up to her ankles. Start with your hands, the head follows, and the heart comes last. This had been her unwavering philosophy.

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  And it worked.

  Or rather it had worked. The symptoms overtook her slowly, subtly, as if by subterfuge, invading her slender body without a single commotion until the whole army had poured in through a crack in the wall. The gray fever had unceremoniously claimed her.

  Facing defeat, Lucia pivoted. Suddenly, time had never felt more finite—less an ocean than a waterfall—and yet her purpose had never been so clear as it was then. Her son was nearly but not yet a man, and she had but a few fleeting months to make him into one. And not just any man, no, for he was meant for more. Gifted was the word, in a way one could only inherit. She needed him to be the best version of himself. She needed him to not sink, to not be dragged down by the weight of loss that had almost dragged her down all those years ago. She needed her son to skim the water like a dragonfly.

  Lucia figured a well-rounded man was composed of three equal parts: his ability to fend for himself, his sense of higher purpose, and his eye for genuine beauty. This formed the foundation of her plan.

  The first thing she did was acquire him a job. He would need money in her absence, and Lucia did not have much to leave him. The quiet tailor who had unrequitedly loved her for the past decade was happy to oblige. When he reported back that her boy was a proficient worker, her heart seemed to beat with new life, as if the news might have jolted into it another week or two. She kissed Mr. Humbledon on the cheek, and he blushed like a ripe tomato.

  Her second task was more difficult than her first. How would she instill in her son a sense of higher purpose? Lucia was already paying for his education, and he was a strong student, though she worried he would not graduate absent her financial support. Had he learned enough already? Over dinners together, she prodded him with questions. He possessed his mother’s ambition and more, that much was plain, but still without a goal to guide him. She suggested maybe one day he could start his own business. Opportunity was limited in a small town like Acreton, he pointed out. “Maybe one day you’ll move,” she told him. “But you’re here,” he said. She smiled at that.

  Her third and final lesson was imparted with the greatest joy and the deepest love. Her son had been drawing with creative abandon since the day he first picked up a pencil, and though Lucia was a painter herself, she embarked to teach her budding young artist a few new techniques. He had always skipped to the exciting parts—chasing his imagination, eschewing repetition—and so, with an increasingly shaky hand, she slowed his eager one. “Beauty breathes in the details,” she said, “in light and in texture.”

  Of course, at the end of it all, Lucia was left to wonder whether she had truly taught her son anything he did not already know, but perhaps such uncertainty was every mother’s curse to bear. It was another kind of evil spell that she could not overcome, pushing its poison through her. After a few more painfully brief months, she was not the only one who took notice.

  The hallmark symptom of the gray fever was an unmistakable pallor that was the reason for its name. The gray fever drained the color right out of you—if only Lucia could have painted herself back together. She was moving slowly, too slowly for regular work, and soon every night she woke up beaded with sweat, adding to an already incurable exhaustion.

  She needed to tell him while she could still muster the right words. He was ready, she decided, because he had to be ready. Lucia had never been a religious woman, but this faith in her son she would take to her grave.

  In the golden hour of a golden day—for death had revealed another stroke of beauty seen only through dying eyes—they strolled side by side down the river out of town, listening to the evening crickets, her son waiting for her to say what he knew she was going to say. “I’m dying,” she told him. In weeks or in months, she wasn’t sure.

  Unsurprisingly, he was not ready to give up on her upon hearing this news. He erected a sturdy facade, but in secret she caught glimpses of him chasing the impossible—consulting the physician who passed through town, reading every book the local library had on medicine—and maybe this was his fourth and final test, though whether it made him more or less well-rounded, she would never know. He’d inherited his mother’s persistence.

  When at last he was ready to hear the truth that she had told him weeks earlier, she said it again with a gentle smile. “Elias, I’m dying.”

  He stared down at his empty hands and asked what he was supposed to do.

  She squeezed his shoulder with what little strength she had left. “I want you to make me a promise,” she replied. “Live for me. Live better than me. Live for your parents and my parents and a thousand dreams unrealized.”