“No, I mean–” I thought for a moment, trying to work my memory back to what felt like decades ago, “Honestly, I don’t really know how they work. We used to joke that we’d managed to trick rocks into thinking.”

“Like Runework?” Gehne answered thoughtfully, having managed to get past her initial shock. Though, she treated almost everything I said with a degree of scepticism—probably a protection for her mind rather than trying to take it all in and treat it as gospel. It was just too far out there to relate to, even for many people back on Earth.

“Well, I can’t really say yes if I don’t know what Runework is.” I jibed gently, though I kept it light. She turned an independently moving eye to me with disbelief.

“Uh, it’s just shifting in physical form?” She said roughly, her explanation more of a dulled down conceptualisation of it than anything.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, “I can grasp the idea of it, but whether it really has all that much to do with what I’m going on about is different. How I shift is a little odd, and I’m not exactly classically trained.” Gehne widened her eyes slightly, jaw dropping and parting her bright lips, shimmering in the remaining light.

“You can shift?” She exclaimed, incredulous. I nodded easily, almost smiling.

“You know, I was led to believe that shifting was a whole lot more common than this. I’ve only met two, maybe three people that have any ability in it.” I gave her a wry shrug.

“How could you think that it was anything less than rare? Shifters, of any sort, are extremely valuable! Learning even the basics force even the richer folk to open up their coffers.” I laughed shortly, the woman eyeing me with interest.

“Well, my teacher was proficient in shifting himself, and I found a way to shift unintentionally. So, I thought that sort of thing would happen at least every once and a while.” Gehne scoffed heavily.

“For the extremely talented, maybe. But they always end up whisked away to some other Empire or Kingdom and get trained or something.” She sighed, looking over the rooftops with a faint sense of longing, for a past she had left behind, “Sometimes I wonder what I would do if I could learn to shift. It would change my life, surely… I just don’t know how.”

“Shifting is just a tool, Gehne.” I said sagely, assuming a stereotypical wise-man tone, “A powerful tool, but a tool, nonetheless. It’s all in how you use it.” She gave me a bored look which made me spilt my face with a grin.

“If you could have all the abilities of, say… a shadow shifter tomorrow,” she jolted with the comparison, but I pushed on, “what would you do with those abilities?”

“I guess…” She started, but quickly weighed the idea in her mind against something else and dropped it, “I don’t know. Should I know?”

“No, probably not.” I said easily, “Who does that actually happen to, you know? Sudden gain of massive power is something straight out of a story book.” Though, while I spoke those words, I turned to her, smiling gently.

“But it happened to me.”

We sat in silence for a while just looking at each other critically. I didn’t bother to look to her emotions, finding myself too emotionally tired to undertake the effortless action. She leaned back slightly, though it wasn’t to distance herself from me and more to sit in a comfortable position.

“How much power?” She asked gently, almost sadly.

“Enough.” I replied cryptically.

“Enough to save the worlds?” She followed up, using my own words against me. The words that I’d used to pacify my little group of discordant miscreants. I shook my head.

“Not quite. The foundation for that kind of power? Maybe.” She looked me over, once again trying to reconcile the man that she knew, the man she saw, and the man I was saying I was. A difficult task it seemed. I laughed softly, deciding to give the woman a somewhat morbid frame of reference.

“You know Shed, Kout, and the Officials?” I asked, pointing to the south-west, the south-east, and the north-east, respectively. She nodded hesitantly; her eyes dubious at the change in conversation.

“Well, if I left this roof now, it might take me three or four hours to return.”

“Return? After wha–” She stopped herself, her eyes going wide and almost fearful as she realised what I meant. I nodded gravely.

“Less, if I knew exactly where they were.” I lifted myself from my spot on the edge of the roof, but before I could move anywhere, I felt the tight grip of a hand close over my wrist. I looked down to the blue hand, feeling the strange, ridged fingers suction to my skin—then looking up at the face of pure surprise that Gehne now wore.

“You aren’t going to–” I barked out a light laugh, a genuine smile making its way to my face despite the accusation.

“No, that would make our jobs exceedingly difficult. Though…” I lifted my arm, dragging the woman’s arm along with my own, her fingers latching themselves to my skin with an exceptional adhesion, “it is an inevitability. That they will need to die, I mean.”

She gulped, unlatching her fingers from my arm, letting me free from her grip. I grinned as I began to gently move atop the ledge while inciting the Sharah, reciting words I’d practiced for thousands of hours. I let myself flow through the moment for a while, my feet and mind guiding me through the frivolous movement, taking me across the side of the building and defying gravity for moments at a time.

I bathed in the wind’s caress, the stone of the building beneath my feet gladly receiving my movements, allowing me to push my speed further and the power of each step to amplify each of my next steps.

The Sharah ramped up, only allowing you to add more and more momentum and strength as you move. With the amount of power that I could produce from my impossibly efficient muscles, far surpassing anything conventionally possible, the Sharah only allowed me to compound that strength further.

The earth, the walls, anything my body could touch, was all my playground for movement and artistry. In the moment of blissful surrender to movement, I realised that someone who was sufficiently skilled in the Sharah, and had the ability to perform it flawlessly and indefinitely, could potentially generate enough force to shatter the world itself.

I stopped, my mind halting with the morose thought. Well, if you were extremely skilled in the Sharah, I guessed. The Sharah might allow you to multiply the force you could wield, and while I had the ability to do so; taking the kinetic energy from something like a punch, and using that to lift my hammer, to then use that force to create a kinetic blast—I couldn’t do that infinitely.

Diminishing returns were a bitch, and the multiplier I could apply to a powerful stomp to the ground was massive, but after that it more than cut in half, eventually only allowing me to maintain a large amount of power, if I were smart about it.

I sighed, before looking back to where I’d once been sitting, finding my company standing on her feet, her jaw so lowered that I couldn’t help but think that it’d come unhinged. I spread my arms slightly, doing a formal half bow that you might see from a dancer to their partner.

“And that, miss Blue-finger, is only the beginning of the power I’ve found myself with—and it’s not even remotely enough to do what I strive towards.”

She clicked her jaw closed, shakily gulping as she eyed my warily. “What was that?”

“The Sharah.” I said simply, though she didn’t seem to know it. Not even Rethi, who seems more than a little obsessed with collecting legends from travellers passing through, had known of the esoteric movement style.

“If that isn’t enough…” She halted her speech as her voice hitched, “then what is?”

I looked her over, feeling a little more power in my bones after the scant moment of tapping into the flow that I had learned to traverse over months of non-stop training. The woman standing across from me was probably some mixture of terrified and in awe, being unlikely to have ever seen someone shift before, let alone to the degree I had. Defying gravity was a great way at astounding just about everyone, even the race that was literally renowned for their ability to climb just about everything.

“People, Gehne.” I grinned, finding some of my humour again, “What I can’t do alone, I just ask others to do for me.”

“Use them, you mean.” She said sourly, managing to pull herself back from her surprise and back into the slight distaste she had for me—something that had festered despite our positive initial reaction.

“Use them?” I laughed, “Sometimes. Depends on how you look at it. Am I just using you as an outlet for pent up distress, or am I offering you a chance to stay, to make more of yourself? Is it ‘using someone’ if I’m giving them what they want?”

“You’re offering me something?” She asked softly, her eyes piercing. I shrugged, walking over to my spot, and easing myself back down to sit.

“I have my ideas.” I laughed at the prickle of disbelief I felt in her emotions, powerful enough of an emotion to seep into my mind without even trying to feel it. Not that it was often I actually had to put forward effort to feel someone’s emotions.

“So; you lure me in with an emotional appeal, telling me about this world you came from, something you could’ve easily made up, and now you want me to go along with whatever you’ve been planning?” Her tone was indignant, but she had a hard time believing her own words.

“Sure.” I laughed merrily, letting her believe whatever she wanted, “But I’ll tell you what, Gehne. There are a lot of things we learn on Earth, a lot of it is just about as stupid as it can get, but one thing that I did learn is that forcing someone into a situation they don’t like is a good way to get yourself betrayed.”

“You don’t say.” She said scornfully, but I powered forwards.

“Honestly, you can run away and never come back for all I care. You can tell the world what I’m planning, if you even know enough about what I’m doing to meaningfully expose what I’m up to. So, let’s be real, right now.” My voice dropped to a powerful, low note. Not intimidating as such, but more on the commanding end.

“You’re milling about through life with no idea what you want. You wanted to be out of danger, and out of crime, so much that when you got out, you realised that you had no plan. The life you ended up with was underwhelming and you don’t like it as much as you thought you would.”

She took a step back, her eyes widening, but I didn’t do anything more than look right at her, my mundane brown eyes giving her a long, bored look.

“You hate the way things are, so much so that you tentatively joined the Skinned Lizard’s little enclave of five, but you have no idea what you could actually do. You ended up telling at least Tek about your past, and that you personally knew Shed—but you insisted that you ‘didn’t want to get involved’ and ended up ostracising yourself from the group further than you’d intended, leaving you as a tag along in truth.”

“Who are you to say that I don’t do anything?” She whispered; her mouth slightly agape with a brutal fury written on her features.

“I’m the only one who’s been moving forward your little group of play-insurrectionists, I’ve probably done more than any of you have in years, barring Tek, who seems to be the only one with any real intention to do anything.” I said, keeping my tone supremely flat, watching as she fought with her own expression, “Don’t even pretend that you’ve done anything more than nabbing a few bits and pieces on Tek’s say so.”

She made an angry growling sound, though the sound tapered into a higher pitch at its end as I furrowed my brow severely.

“So what do you really want, Gehne? Do you want the quiet life, away from the action, or do you want to be in the thick of the danger once again? Do you want to risk it all for something better than what you’ve got? Risk this quaint little life you’ve built for yourself for the sake of everyone else?” I tilted my head to the side, “Or is that too altruistic for you?”

She scoffed, spinning around to walk away, but only managing to pace backwards and forwards from me, unable to force herself to run away. She whipped around to look at me again, scowling with a furious intensity.

“How dare you.” She hissed, “It’s so easy to reduce me, and everything I’ve worked for, down to a few questions, isn’t it? To make it all so simple when you know that even posing the question is enough to change my life forever.”

“Gehne.” I said, my voice exceptionally quiet, only barely travelling over the night air, and maybe it was the warning in my voice, or maybe it was the power of the Hearth that blazed with the heat of a live campfire.

“I’m going to make this easy. You’ve done nothing, and just because you used to be Blue-finger doesn’t mean shit. So now is the time to shut up and take action. Otherwise, you’re doing nothing more than playing around with adults in the war room.” I left the air full of silence, though the woman was just about shaking with a deluge of emotions so violently extreme that I couldn’t bare to delve into.

“So what will it be, Gehne. Will you choose to go home, and keep things exactly how they’ve been—or will you change things and become more?”

She restrained another growl, clenching her jaw as she stared at the ground desperately, as if it would give her a satisfactory answer to the demanding question. I didn’t let up, my eyes boring into her bowed head. I was resigned to whatever answer she’d give whether or not it worked in my favour.

But… as her head turned up from the ground, rage in her expression, I found myself grinning from ear to ear. It was a gratification like nothing else, making the power of the Hearth radiate from me like a billowing furnace of heat, infusing the night air with an almost vibrating power.

She had her answer.

“Good.”