"...and I am simply suggesting that what you call the Weave is functionally identical to Faith, the primary distinction being that your ritualistic framework is essentially a cognitive scaffold for minds incapable of sustaining direct intentional coherence without external anchoring."
The old man, white-bearded, spectacled, wrapped in a robe that had clearly survived several decades of use, looked at her calmly.
"You have been here four days."
"Three and a half, Archimagus Aldric."
"And in three and a half days you have concluded that everything I have spent two hundred and thirty years studying is..." he gestured vaguely.
"A workaround," Chiara offered.
"A workaround." He set his tea down. "Interesting."
"I mean it constructively."
"I am sure you do." He rose, crossed to the wall of diagrams, and tapped a specific cluster of symbols near the centre. "Explain this then."
It was a sequence she had seen variations of several times already, what she had tentatively classified as a resonance amplification loop, using what he called Vethric Binding to sustain output beyond the natural decay threshold of a single Will projection.
Straightforward enough in principle... the symbol at the centre however was doing something she could not immediately account for, a recursive fold that seemed to feed output back into the initiation point, which should, by any framework she possessed, cause immediate catastrophic feedback.
"That recursive fold should collapse the entire sequence."
"And yet…"
Aldric drew it in the air with two fingers, pale symbols assembling themselves, and closed it.
The fold activated. The sequence ran clean and stable.
"That," she said after a moment, "is currently presenting a significant challenge to my existing models."
"Is it?"
"The recursive fold should generate a coherence collapse at the reinitiation node. The energy has nowhere to go except back into itself, which means the output should be..." she trailed off.
"Mhm."
"Give me a moment."
"Take your time."
Several minutes passed. Aldric poured himself more tea.
"I will need to..." she began.
"You don't."
"I don't what?"
"Need to explain it. Some things simply are, child. More than two hundred years and I still cannot tell you precisely why the Vethric Binding works. I just know that it does."
He shrugged and leaned back as he picked up the cup of tea. "Not everything needs to be understood to be accepted."
"That," she said, "is a very elegant way of saying you simply gave up."
Aldric sighed deeply into his tea.
Annoyingly unusual, this one. And yet... more entertainment than he'd had in years, if he was being honest with himself. Her talent was something beyond even savants of his calibre, which was not a conclusion he arrived at lightly after two centuries of meeting people who thought they were exceptional.
He smiled quietly into his cup as she continued, words pouring out in a continuous stream of terminology he had never encountered and could not entirely follow... and just nodded along anyway.
***
Imani stood at the anvil, hammer raised.
"Wrong," said a voice somewhere below his elbow.
Imani lowered the hammer. "I haven't struck yet."
"Exactly." An old dwarf, who stood at approximately the height of Imani's hip and carried roughly the same width, crossed his arms and stared up at him. "You are standing wrong. Your weight is wrong. Your grip is wrong. Your face is wrong."
"My face?"
"You look like a man doing a job, child! Sjeltemring is not a job."
He said the word the way people said the names of things they considered sacred, which Imani was beginning to understand was exactly what it was.
"Strike the metal like a job, you get a tool. Strike it like it matters... you get something that lasts ten generations and sings when drawn." He paused. "Your face should know the difference."
Imani looked at the piece of metal on the anvil. A simple ingot, nothing remarkable. They had been working on the same ingot for a long while now.
"It is an ingot," Imani said carefully.
"Now it is an ingot." The dwarf picked up his own hammer, a thing so proportionally enormous for his frame it should have been comical, and held it loosely at his side. "Everything begins as nothing. The Sjeltemring does not see what is. He sees what it will become, and his Faith bridges the gap between the two." He squinted up at Imani. "You have strong Faith, yes? They told me you have a strong Faith."
"I have, Runehammer Dolgrin."
"Show me."
Imani let it rise, Guardian Star flickering to life around him, warm and steady, the light of it filling the forge with a second glow alongside the fire.
The dwarf studied it for a long moment, walking a slow circle around Imani with his hands behind his back, examining the Will Manifest the way a buyer examined livestock at a market.
"Hm," he said finally.
"Hm good or hm bad?"
"Hm... considerable." He stopped in front of him, craning his neck back to maintain eye contact, apparently finding nothing awkward about the geometry of it. "You have the raw material. Like the ingot." A pause. "Now we make something of it."
He pulled over a stool, climbed it without ceremony, and planted himself at eye level with Imani, close enough that the height difference became largely irrelevant and the dynamic shifted into something that felt, despite all physical evidence to the contrary, like being addressed by someone considerably larger than yourself.
"First lesson of Sjeltemring," Dolgrin said, pointing a thick finger at the ingot. "Feel it."
Imani looked at the ingot.
"I mean it literally, child. Put your hand on it and feel it. Not the temperature. Not the weight. It."
Imani placed his palm flat against the metal.
Silence held for a moment.
"Well?" Dolgrin said.
"It feels like... metal."
Dolgrin closed his eyes briefly in the manner of someone requesting patience from a higher power.
"We are going to be here a while," he said.
"So I gathered," Imani replied.
Despite himself, the corner of Dolgrin's mouth moved.
"Good," he said, climbing down from the stool and picking up his hammer. "At least you are honest." He glanced up at him. "Your mother raised you well."
Imani smiled quietly. "She did."
"Good woman," Dolgrin said firmly, despite never having met her, in a tone that left no room for disagreement.
He raised his hammer.
"Now. Watch."
***
"You arrived quicker than I thought," Lukas said with a smile, sitting on one of the branches of a massive tree deep in the boreal forest, one leg hanging loose as he sipped from a thermal canteen, the frozen canopy stretching wide and white below them in every direction.
"Nice spot," Ayu said as she landed over it, her gaze moving around the frozen forest, hands at her hips.
"Beep, beep."
"Oh, hi Gerald, how's it been?" she smiled at the little roller.
"Beeeep, beep!"
"Excited, huh?"
Lukas raised an eyebrow. "Oh, so you can tell already?"
"Well, yes, Gerald is pretty clear with his stuff," Ayu said as she settled onto the branch beside him. Her nose twitched slightly as she eyed the steam curling from his canteen. "What's that?"
"Good stuff," Lukas grinned. "They call it Frostmjød-te. Old Norse blend, pine resin, dried cloudberries, and some mystery tree juice. Weird combo… but yeah, it’s good."
"Hmm, interesting," Ayu said, already looking away at the forest below.
"I take that as it's not your cup of tea," Lukas laughed at his own pun before storing it away.
"So you wanna travel with me and Gerald... may I ask the reason? I thought you would have been more keen to join the beastmen community of The Covenant."
"Nah, that's Master Makoh's path, not mine," she said, staring down at the frozen expanse below, her bare feet dangling from the branch, the cold clearly not bothering her in the slightest.
She exhaled slowly, leaned back on her extended arms and looked up at the pale sky through the canopy. "As for mine… I don't have an answer to the next step, so maybe just… going without direction for a while would help me find it."
Lukas nodded. "So you went and found the other guy that doesn't know what he's doing?"
Ayu smiled, tilting her head at him. "Also the guy that knows how to have fun, and somehow still makes progress."
"I would take that as a compliment." Lukas stood up, grabbing the camping backpack that had been resting beside him.
Ayu stayed quiet for a moment, her gaze still on the canopy above, the pale light filtering through the frozen branches in long broken shafts.
"You know Lukas, when I was a kid I had this thing where… if you just closed your eyes, the world couldn't touch you. Like, all the monsters in the shadows, all the bad stuff… just, gone. Close your eyes and it can't find you," she paused, a faint smile on her face. "Dumb, right. But it felt so real back then."
She slowly raised her open palm toward the sky, a few snowflakes drifting down and dissolving against her warmth before they even landed.
"And then you grow up and you get it, like, that's not how it works. You cannot just close your eyes anymore. Life is complicated. It's hard and it hurts and all that. But also…" she kept her palm open, eyes still up, "...it's still so amazing? Like, genuinely. There's so much out there. So much to see, to feel, to just… be part of. So why do we keep making it harder than it already is?"
Lukas grinned, staring at the same canopy. "La vita è bella."
"I don't know what you said but… yeah," she chuckled, lowering her hand. "Anyway. What I'm looking for is somewhere along those lines. And like, yeah it's childish maybe, but… Will opens so many possibilities and I just… I wanna remove the limits for my song to be… more… free."
"Beeep, beep!"
Lukas smiled. "Gerald agrees, and so do I. Doesn't sound childish at all by the way. Sounds very much like you."
Ayu turned to him. "Thanks, Lukas."
"Alright then," he said, swinging the backpack on. "Heard there are some very interesting creatures in these forests. More than half would probably try to kill us on sight but… should be fine."
Ayu laughed, already moving. "Let's go!"
A moment later they both dropped from the massive tree, letting gravity do its thing, the frozen ground rushing up fast.
"By the way," Lukas said mid-air, casual as anything, "what do you think Alonso would be doing right now?"
Ayu landed with barely a sound on the snow below, glanced around at the frozen forest stretching out in every direction, and considered it for a second before smiling.
"Knowing him... training non-stop, cheating death, and probably fighting the worst this world has to offer."
***
Alonso was rubbing his temples at his desk, which was somehow filled to the brim with what he would politely describe as love letters, even if more than half were a considerable 'bit' more than that.
He had also, in the last hour alone, escorted three separate young ladies out of his office under increasingly creative circumstances, one of whom had been waiting inside the wardrobe when he arrived, dressed with exactly the amount of clothing she had been born with.
As for Marcello and the other Maestros... they had somehow organised themselves into what could only be a rotating schedule, knocking at precise intervals to offer casual talks about connections and mutual friends. Like... since when were any of them his friends in the first place?
He leaned back in his chair and checked his Mantle’s token. Fourteen directed contracts, all filed under 'custody' and 'bodyguard', every location a palace or a mansion, every date coinciding with a ball announced today. Somehow.
The rewards were, curiously, five times higher than a public contract to kill an actual, fucking Baron!
He stared at the ceiling for a long moment.
At this point... just give me monsters to fight. A dungeon, a boss, something I can swing a sword at.
This… this was hell.