First Among Equals Chapter 27: Touching Upon Surfaces

Caen recalibrated his pocket watch at the archway as soon as they stepped through the Aperture. It was well past midnight.

His eyes were blindfolded, but he had no problem seeing, all thanks to his speculon—it was proving quite handy. The lampposts of placid reshent surrounding the archway were so bright that they would have undoubtedly worsened his migraine if he'd been keeping his physical eyes open. There weren't any Valiants out here at this ti.

The Valiants' lodge by the Redshadow archway was a one-story longhouse made entirely of wood. There was an outbuilding behind it with a public bath and privy. On the inside of the lodge, bunk beds were cramd along the walls in two rows. Dim lamps on the roof offered sparse lighting.

It was mostly empty right now. A group of four sat around the bunk at one end of the lodge, and a bare-chested man lay atop a solitary bunk, snoring. The last ti Caen had spent the night here with Vensha's party, it had been packed full with Valiants.

She led them to the center of the room and tossed her bag onto a bottom bunk. “Settle in,” she said. “I'll keep first watch and sleep at dawn.”

Ideally, the rest of her party would be here, and they'd have split the night watch into shorter shifts.

Grimacing, Caen took a clean sheet of cloth from his backpack and laid it over the mattress on a bottom bunk beside Vensha’s. Zeris did the sa for the layer above his, before hauling herself up. The mattress was so ratty and lumpy that the floor might have been better.

Simulating Untor's Boulder left him panting like he'd run a mile at full speed. He still wasn't exactly at his limit, but he didn't want to push himself too hard tonight.

“et up at Uncle Vai's?” Zeris called.

“I honestly doubt I could,” he said. Last ti he'd felt this drained, he'd overslept and hadn't even dreamt that night.

His mind, though, was spinning with ideas for how to cut down the ti he spent boosting his affinities. Sleep ca easily, and in a short while, he'd drifted off.

* * *

“—en. Caen.”

He jerked awake and instantly regretted it. His head was pounding. Not nearly as badly as it had been last night. Because of his headache, he hadn't tightened his blindfold before sleeping off, and now the blindfold had shifted a fraction, letting in burning daylight.

He snapped his eyes shut, and imdiately, his vision was replaced with the clean distinctness of his speculon.

“We've been trying to wake you for minutes,” Zeris said. “Are you… alright?”

“My head still hurts, I think I need so more sleep,” Caen said, readjusting his blindfold and tightening it at the back. His pocket watch put the ti at 6 in the morning.

“That’s fine,” Aunt Vensha said. “Zeris, take over?”

Caen didn't even wait to hear her response before he drifted off again.

* * *

He woke up with a start. It was almost 10 in the morning, and he was incredibly hungry.

Zeris was sitting on Vensha's bed, moving an orb of fla between her fingers. The lodge was currently quite a bit fuller than it'd been last night.

“Where’s Aunt Vensha?” he asked.

“Still sleeping,” Zeris said, jutting her chin at the top bunk above his. “Feeling any better?”

“Yes. I could eat a horse whole, though.” He sat up carefully, suppressing a groan. “Tahal, these beds are just awful.” And he still felt sore from his workout two days ago.

Zeris rolled her eyes. “You're just spoiled.”

He laughed as he took off his blindfold. “We can't all have terrible sleeping habits.”

“It’s not a habit. I can stop whenever I want.”

Snorting, Caen stood and began running through stretches. The surrounding bunks were left empty, but he could see other parties taking up adjacent rows and talking loudly. The place slled rank, even with the windows open.

He sat on the lumpy mattress with his back to the wall and activated Soul-sense. For practice, he cleansed his slag without Mimicking Zeris's affinity. As he did so, he observed his soul structure. A great deal of the sensations coming from Soul-sense were not just physical. So of them were spiritual in nature, and this would be the first ti he was just focusing on those alone.

Aunt Vensha was up an hour later, and together they went out front to purchase als from one of the few food vendors under a large tree.

There was an area beside the outbuilding with a few crude free weights lying around. Mimicking Vensha's Body-enhancent affinity, Caen and Vensha worked out for about an hour. Zeris just leaned against a tree, reading.

Back in Redshadow, he and Vensha began the unpleasant work of capturing another one-tail. Caen carried it this ti, hauling it like a bucket of water. He constructed a muzzle for it, so it wouldn't bite him.

They camped on a mound with sparse trees. Aunt Vensha was working on her combat forms while Zeris sat with her eyes closed, training her spatial acuity.

The shadeling’s soul-structure kept trembling, but Caen knew from his experience yesterday that this wouldn't go on for too long. He cracked his neck. This was going to take a while. He got into it and, in spite of the shuddering soul structure, soon settled into the comforting tedium of isolating one of the shadeling's prominent clusters.

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Once he'd done this, he examined it more closely. Fortunately, the shadeling had long since stopped spasming, even though it continued to wriggle in its bonds. He focused on the various elents of the isolated cluster until he could make out the impressions more clearly. This one gave the impression of ‘surfaces’ or, more precisely, the idea of ‘touching upon surfaces’. It was alien and made almost no sense.

A new problem presented itself. Every ti Caen had Mimicked soone's affinity, he'd known what discipline of magic they were employing at that very mont. This made it straightforward for him to determine which of his thread clusters represented the sa affinity. Now, however, he was starting without that key detail.

Thread clusters of the sa affinity shared certain properties, but those were hard to determine. Yesterday, after hours of comparing his Spirit-healing thread cluster to Zeris's and Vensha's, he'd barely gotten a vague impression. Which naturally excluded this thod. It would take far too long.

The other option was basic trial and error. Every ti he tried conforming his affinity to soone else's, there was a malleability to his relevant thread cluster, but whenever there wasn't anyone to Mimic, his thread clusters felt rigid and unmoldable. He'd tried to conform his Fire magic thread cluster to Zeris's Spirit-healing thread cluster, but it had been rigid. His thread clusters refused to change unless they were being molded according to the configuration of a thread cluster that shared the sa affinity.

Trial and error presented yet another problem. While Caen knew at least one first elevation spell in several disciplines of magic, there were far more disciplines he couldn't cast in.

But he could still go about this efficiently.

Several scholars insisted that Planar creatures didn't use magic local to the world of Saffron. One very popular planologist, whose encyclopedia was vaunted at the Drenlin phrontistery, described the shadelings of Redshadow as using two otherworldly strains of magic which bore close similarities to the Saffronan disciplines of Body-enhancent and Vibration magic.

He could start with these.

He located his Body-enhancent thread cluster, which he'd grown fairly familiar with. When he tried to remold it in accordance with the shadeling's thread cluster, nothing happened. The thread cluster refused to move.

He cast a Vibration spell next. It was a simple voice projection spell, and though it collapsed each ti he cast it, he was able to identify which thread cluster represented that affinity in his soul structure. It was rigid as well.

Caen frowned. “Touching upon surfaces,” he muttered to himself. He spent a while longer concentrating on the shadeling's thread cluster. No new or more distinct impressions ca through.

What touches upon surfaces? Caen wondered.

He rubbed his chin. Kinesis magic concerned the propulsion or repulsion of bodies or objects—so, surfaces. But it also had to do with raw force manipulation. Every classical elent was either itself a surface or interacted heavily with surfaces. Gleam magic, too, could interact with surfaces, though it didn't need to.

He looked at the shadeling, it had kept squirming soundlessly all this ti. Maybe he was going about this the wrong way. Shadelings in Redshadow were a mystery. Their behavioural patterns seed to be set in stone until you got to the four-tailed ones. But even among the lesser shadelings, he had so many unanswered questions about the things they did, and the reasons why.

They were called ‘shadelings’. The Plane’s na, for so reason, was ‘Redshadow’. And shadows weren't even cast here. That particular oddity had sent him and Zeris searching for an explanation, though they hadn't found any. He'd just chalked it up to Planar shenanigans.

Gleam magic entailed the manipulation of light and shadows thereof. It was worth a try.

He muttered the incantation, spirit contorting with effort. Specks of light manifested above his palm for an instant before winking out as the spell construct collapsed. He located the cluster in his soul structure that represented his affinity for Gleam magic.

It was malleable, begging to be remolded.

“Why didn't you speak up earlier?” he accused the thread cluster under his breath. Of course, it didn't reply.

This was interesting, though. As far as he knew, there was nothing like Shadow magic. Gleam's influence of shadow was very indirect. Caen penned down so of his thoughts in his notebook. He would have to look into this later.

He set about conforming his Gleam magic affinity to the shadeling's. In half an hour, he was done. He felt nothing that might be described as a passive augntation. And that primal and instinctive understanding that usually accompanied a boosted affinity was notably lacking.

Zeris was still ditating, and Aunt Vensha was reading a book. He squinted. That was Zeris's Hillian Prir.

He cast a Gleam spell and his spirit sprang into executing the requisite patterns with great eagerness. The visualizations were borne effortlessly in his mind. Smiling, he layered modifiers on the construct, changing its color. He had never successfully cast this spell before, and it showed: the spell construct drank his mana, and casting it had taken several long seconds.

Seconds! I'm never getting over this feeling, he thought. The ease with which he was doing sothing that usually entailed struggle and failure for him. He shook his head in wonder.

Blue light rippled all over his body, billowing like a coat caught in the wind. This was the most complex Gleam spell Caen knew. It didn't really do anything. It had just looked rather impressive the one ti he'd seen his uncle, Sh'kteiro, do it.

Vensha glanced up from her book. Both her brows rose.

Zeris cracked an eye. “Oh. Oh wow. Gleam? From shadelings?”

“Apparently,” he said, dismissing the spell to free up his attention.

“How does that work?” she asked. “I an, what about these creatures suggests Gleam magic?”

“Well, I guess they sort of look like shadows,” Vensha said. “Especially their tails.”

“Yeah, but those literally turn into other physical and clearly tangible shadelings,” Zeris said.

The shadeling’s tail had brushed Caen's arm several tis today and had felt as substantial as the rest of its body. “I went off on a hunch,” he said, shrugging. “The na of this place, that weird shadow anomaly, and the impressions I got from the shadeling's soul structure.”

They had lunch from the food they'd purchased at the lodge.

Caen spent the rest of their ti in Redshadow Mimicking the shadeling's other affinities. These unsurprisingly turned out to be Vibration magic and Body-enhancent. Both affinities seed much weaker than the Gleam affinity, and Caen resisted the temptation to send out projections of his voice to startle Valiant parties in the distance.

Caen caught movent in the corner of his vision that caused him to whip his head to the side and terminate his connection to the one-tailed shadeling. It might have been his imagination, but he'd caught the briefest hint of two long tails in a copse of trees below them.

When he looked back at the one-tailed shadeling bound on the ground, it was perfectly still. Just like with the one he'd captured yesterday.

Caen returned his attention to the copse of trees and continued to stare.

“What?” Vensha asked, looking at him. “Did you see sothing?”

“I'm not sure. A two-tails, I think. It might have been more. I didn't get a good look.”

“Then we're moving,” Vensha said.

They relocated to another mound a half mile away. Caen spent the rest of their ti there trying to improve how quickly he could Mimic affinities.

That night, they took a train back to Beslin. Aunt Vensha was drawing stares from the passengers, standing as she was by the entrance. Zeris continued training her spatial acuity while Caen spent the train ride observing his soul structure.