Emilia brought him on a quick circuit around the whole clearing and pointed out several places where there seed to be a recurring set of glyphs. Caden realised that the more he looked, the more there was to see his initial impression that there was only a single line of glyphs was wrong. As soon as Emilia started directing his attention to specific parts of the ring, he noticed that so of these glyphs were sohow folded into or under other glyphs, and he could only see them if he was looking very carefully. His mind struggled to cope with the odd reality that was being presented to his eyes.
'How... how did you even spot that?' he asked, squinting and tilting his head to try and better see one set of those folded glyphs.
'It's easier if you relax,' Emila said, noting his distress. 'Or... or you tense your mind in a specific way. Imagine you're trying to cross your eyes, but it's your mind instead.'
Crossing his mind made no physical sense, but he thought he got the gist of what she ant. It took him a couple of minutes, but he finally managed the ntal trick that allowed him to view those folded glyphs with a little more clarity, though it was hard for him to really get a fix on them. It was, he realised, a lot like an optical illusion. If he prid himself to see the folded glyphs, his perspective would undergo a disconcerting shift and he would be able to see them, but that also ant that he wasn't able to pay attention to the unfolded glyphs while he was doing this. He couldn't handle reading them both simultaneously.
A part of him was beginning to despair at the impossibility of the task. The glyphs themselves were already unfathomably alien, their three-dinsional shapes taunting his inability to comprehend them. And now there were more of them, perched on the edge of his ability to even see them. What if there were more glyphs that he and Emilia literally could not perceive?
'I know,' Emilia murmured. 'And I understand if you want to give up.'
Caden spun around with a start. 'What?'
Even though she didn't move, Caden felt his attention being drawn to the arcana around him as if she had pointed to it. His emotions weren't exactly spilling out, but they did colour the space around him a little. There was no use hiding them, so he firmly pushed that seed of doubt aside and squared himself as he faced Emilia.
'I'm not giving up here. I'm feeling out of my depth, but I have no intention of leaving or doing nothing. We are not letting the Prophecy do what it wants to you without a fight.'
After Emilia had pointed out the colours of his own emotions bleeding into the space around him, Caden thought he could catch the tenor of Emilia's thoughts too. The air around her lightened a little after what he said, and it was only then he realised that a miasma of fear and despair had been there in the clearing all along the product of her days of consciousness within this space as she tried and failed to find a way to escape.
He felt a swell of pity, but it was quickly replaced by sothing more urgent the excitent of discovery. 'Emilia! That thing you did. You didn't move, but you sort of... pointed? And I saw my emotional state in the arcana around ? How did you do that?'
'What, this?' she asked, and now Caden found his attention drawn to a random spot in the clearing even though she hadn't lifted a finger.
'Yes! You're doing sothing with your auric-ambient-flare, aren't you?'
She frowned. 'I think so. I didn't even realise I wasn't physically pointing.'
'Try it again. How does that work?'
'I have no idea.' She exerted her will and directed Caden to look at various parts of the clearing, and he confird that it had worked by naming what he was currently looking at.
'Have you figured it out?' Caden asked after she had paused for several seconds and done nothing except stare into the distance.
She gave a little tsk of impatience but didn't look at him. 'Wait. I'm... trying... sothing.'
Caden tried to wait patiently, but there was no hiding the little cloud of repressed excitent that was building up around him. He hoped that Emilia wouldn't be distracted by that because he had no idea how to stop his emotions from colouring the arcana. It didn't even seem possible at the mont, his attempts to rein it in felt like he was trying to hide where his eyes were looking.
The surest way to hide an emotion was simply to not feel it at all, so he tried to distract himself by turning his mind to the puzzle of Emilia's attention-directing ability. The theory that had gotten him so excited in the first place was that Emilia was actually operating at a level in oblivion that went beyond the physical body that was currently occupying this space. But since this was oblivion, there was more significance to that.
All arcanists already operated beyond the confines of their physical body once they started making use of ambient arcana. For him and his friends, dipping into the arcanic sea and using that arcanic sense to navigate ant that they could operate at a greater level of control and mastery. It was like being able to hear and play music instead of simply being confined to looking at the notes of a score.
His theory was that oblivion functioned in the sa way it was simply a deeper layer of reality, a level where they could experience more of the richness of it beyond what their human senses were capable of catching. And Emilia had tapped onto so sort of oblivion sense, for lack of a better term, just like how the rest of them had tapped into an arcanic sense to help them navigate the arcanic sea.
An explosion of frustration from Emilia distracted him. It was so strong that she had summoned her own spectre of emotion that she had to fight to hold at bay, but she quickly dissipated the dangerous cloud of feelings with more speed and certainty than Caden had managed. It was clear that she had beco quite adept at it through practice. Caden felt a little sting of pity as he imagined how she must have felt, alone and unsupported in this alien space for days of subjective ti.
'Don't pity ,' she snapped at him, though she imdiately composed herself and gave him an apologetic look. 'Sorry. Things like that never bothered before, but since my ti with Kevan, I have beco a little more aware of these things. And I've beco strangely concerned with what people think. And it doesn't help that you are literally advertising your emotions here.'
Caden shrugged helplessly. 'I can't help how I honestly feel. But you should also know that I respect you a lot. I'm not sure if I would be able to be so composed if I were in your position.'
She pursed her lips, then acknowledged his complint with a curt nod. 'What I tried didn't work. I don't know why, but I can't do more than ntally point.'
'Can you tell how it's done? Maybe we can figure sothing out from there.'
'As far as I can tell, it does have sothing to do with my auric-ambient-flare. Rember what I said about tensing your mind in a certain way to see the glyphs? Well, while you're doing that, you also focus a little burst of intent. For , it is the sa... sa... collection of feelings and impressions and muscle contractions that I associate with pointing my physical finger. Except I don't actually intend to move my body, I only intend to fra my mind in that shape.'
Caden's brow furrowed as he tried to follow along. 'Okay. If we try and use physical analogies... it's basically like trying to hold a pose and then do so other action. Like maybe standing on one foot, and then crossing your arms.Except instead of holding a physical pose, you're, uh, holding a ntal pose.'
Emilia nodded. 'Yes, that analogy works. But I can't show you my ntal pose. The best I can do is describe what I'm thinking about, and you have to go from there. But you rember our exercises about noticing everything? Well, it applies here too. There is a shape to our thoughts, our minds. When I think of my ho, there is a pose that my mind falls into, and I feel and know what my ho ans. The mind stretches to bridge pictures, emotions, anings, sensations, into one word. That stretch is the pose you must be aware of.'
The ntal gymnastics involved here were stunning, and Caden couldn't help but feel thoroughly impressed with Emilia's ability to have co this far on her own. Her descriptions were helping him make sense of his own thoughts in ways that hadn't even occurred to him before.
'A shape to our thoughts,' he muttered, thinking hard.
Their auric-ambient-flares were proof of that, he realised, and he wondered at how it hadn't been imdiately apparent to him before. Their thoughts and emotions had so sort of, for lack of a better term, physicality, except it wasn't corporeal in the sa way that their bodies were. He looked inwardly at his own auric-ambient-flare and started reading his own threads. If they twisted like this, it ant that. You could see aning from the very structure of the fibres. That was how their arcanic senses worked. But here in oblivion, on a richer layer of reality, you could do more than see. You could hear, and sll, and taste, and touch.
But those receptive senses were simply the beginning. Babies learned how to take in the sensations of the world around them. And then, thus grounded in their reality, they started to walk. To run. To dance. To sing. To paint. To write.
He delved into his own auric-ambient-flare to watch himself watching, to see his mind unspooling itself in threads of thought. The recursive effect that had baffled him so much back when he had first done this in the arcanic sea was now less unintelligible and more aningful to him. This was the shape of his mind when he looked at the world around him. That was the shape of his mind when he thought of ho. This was what happened if he looked inside his auric-ambient-flare while looking at sothing else.
After just a minute of this, he had to stop. He felt ntally exhausted.
'You've gotten sothing,' Emilia said, staring at him. Then her expression soured a little. 'In just one minute.'
He couldn't help but let out a little laugh. 'You laid the foundation. And I've had the dubious benefit of having my mind taken apart and put back together again. Turns out that made a little more aware of the threads of my own psyche.'
'So how does this work?' she asked, pointing ntally in random directions to indicate the ability she was referring to.
Caden grinned, and with a flex of his will, he directed her attention to her own auric-ambient-flare, and she gasped in sudden comprehension.
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