MYTRAN: Hast thou never found thyself in error? Hast thou not once spoken of what thou knew not for a truth?

VOTHES: Never.

MYTRAN: Then I shall teach thee, for of a surety that answer betrays thine ignorance more truly than aught else thou hast said this day.

-The Learning of Vothes

I sat at Desten 3’s kitchen table, trying unsuccessfully to formulate a second copy of my shield section. Pelys grew more impatient by the day and if I didn’t begin making progress soon I feared he’d take drastic action.

“What are you working on today?” Desten asked as he wandered in with a plate of food.

“Advanced disruption shield.” I demonstrated my one small section, the result of weeks of focused practice. “I’m supposed to be multiplying this section into a full sphere, but I can’t figure out how to do that.”

“You never went to academy, did you?” Desten asked, taking a seat opposite me. He set down the plate and put a hand out, crafting a quick cube of yellow light in the air between us.

I shook my head, but it seemed the question was rhetorical, as he didn’t wait for a reply before continuing.

“There’s a conceptual barrier between a base form and a full construct. It’s one thing to alter the form of an existing creation…” the cube before him stretched out, elongating without damage to its integrity, maintaining the same solidity and clarity, “but to duplicate it is another operation entirely.” The cube replicated up and down, making a solid wall of identical light bricks.

“Yes, Pel has said as much. He said I needed to visualize the extrapolation while feeding power into the construct. But whenever I try, it only expands the section, not duplicating it.”

“Start with something easier, then. How do you make your basic shield?”

“A line that spins. Isn’t that what everyone does?”

“No. It’s all conceptual.” He hadn’t touched his food, but he stood and gestured for me to follow him outside.

His gardens were nowhere near as expansive as Desten 1’s, and honestly bore little resemblance to the well-kept courtyards and mazes of the close-line nobility. They were overgrown nearly to the point of being called wild, with only cursory attempts made to tame their brambles and weeds.

Desten grimaced when he saw the state of them and flared out his power in a quick slash of brilliant yellow, cutting off the grass underfoot to a reasonable length before sweeping the cuttings off to the side where they joined an existing mound of dry brown cuttings.

He stepped into the center of the cleared ground and nodded in satisfaction. “Here, watch. I’ll do this as slowly as I can.”

Desten’s yellow fire burst up around him, beginning in a circle at his feet, then climbing until it formed a complete solid sphere around him. The light danced like flames for a second before settling into the steady clarity of a perfect shield.

“Oh.” I hadn’t ever tried building it from the bottom up. Before doing the spinning arc, I’d always imagined inflating it into shape. “Pel spins his,” I added, a bit defensive.

“That’s not important.” Desten waved his hand dismissively. “The point is that it doesn’t matter how you do it as long as it works. Like writing.”

I frowned. “You’ve lost me.”

“The standard method is what you’ve seen, to treat your power like a lathe until it merges together. But! If you stop and think about it, it really doesn’t make sense. A single line of power no matter how fast you rotate it shouldn’t ever make a solid form.”

“But it works.”

“Because it can be accepted conceptually by the majority of individuals. But for me, it never clicked. I couldn’t quite believe that’s how it worked, so it didn’t. Until I imagined it as growing flames.”

“What does that have to do with writing?”

Desten smiled. “It’s exactly like writing. More so for you than me, honestly, since you write poetry and I write non-fiction. You don’t start with a perfect sentence or a perfect rhythm. You add words, remove words, until in the end it works. Just like power constructs. It doesn’t matter the process - if you think about the sentence until you can write it perfectly on the first try, or if you write it one word at a time, or if you scribble it all out and revise on the page. And you can do the same with your power. It doesn’t have to be perfect on the first try.”

I blinked. “But, once you create it, it’s going to be solid.”

Desten raised his eyebrows at me and his bubble stretched out, becoming longer and thinner, without any of the warping or disruption I’d witnessed with Retti’s compression of the duel shield. “Only if you make it solid,” he said.

“But … it is solid.”

“Only if you make it solid,” Desten repeated. He brought the shield in closer to himself, waved a hand through it, then rapped on its interior surface with his hand. “You can’t think of them as a permanent thing, a real thing.”

“But it is real! You just tapped on it.”

“It’s a construct. It can be as physical or non-physical as you want.” He frowned slightly. “Did you pay no attention in school?”

I shrugged, uncomfortable, and tried to come up with some way to avoid outright lying. “I … didn’t attend regularly.”

“That why you’re still only tay?”

“Maybe. I’ve never cared to take the advancement tests.”

“You should consider it, especially with all this advanced training. If you attain a higher rank, you’ll be considered more eligible for better positions.”

“I don’t want a position in governance or administration.”

“If you’re going to stay here, one of us is going to have to get a job soon,” Desten said resignedly. “I was hoping our tour would help my book sales pick up, but things aren’t looking good. If neither of us publishes anything big within the next couple months, we’ll have to start looking for alternatives.”

I hadn’t given much thought to Desten’s financial situation. I’d always assumed all nobles were solvent, and until now none of my interactions with him had indicated otherwise. But he was only ebi rank, and I’d never heard him mention his family. It seemed he was in worse fiscal condition than I’d assumed.

I shook my head and waved off the thought. “My rank isn’t important right now. We can figure out finances another time. Do you know how to help with this shield, or not?” It came out a bit more snappish than I’d intended. But right now, Retti and Desten could be out murdering and stealing and desecrating, and the sooner I mastered this stupid shield the sooner we could put a stop to them.

Even if the thought terrified me for more reasons than one.

Desten inhaled sharply, blinked, and nodded. “I … yes. I apologize for the digression. My own zeal as a student doesn’t minimize your achievements, especially if undertaken later in life. It’s admirable.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, disliking the patronizing feel of his words.

“Okay. New exercise. You can make a line, correct?” Desten demonstrated with a short line of light, about a handspan tall, that hovered in the air between us.

I replicated his feat, though my own line hovered right beside my hand, unwilling to be pushed out any further from my body.

“Is it solid, or not?” Desten asked.

“Yes. It’s solid.”

“Make it non-solid.”

I released the construct, encouraging it to dissolve, and created another identical line but to give light without substance.

“No, don’t make a new one. Change the one you have. Turn that line solid.”

“How? That doesn’t make sense. It’s light. You can’t switch from light to solid and back.”

“It never stops being light even when it’s solid. Light is just a word. Reality isn’t so inflexible as language.”

I sighed. “Weren’t you just trying to convince me that power is like language?”

“Like sentences which can be built of different words. Like rhythms. You can rhyme Fire with Pyre, or Mire with Dire, and it still works the same. But that’s not to say a dire mire is anything like a pyre fire.”

I shook my head. While I appreciated Desten’s attempt to help, his explanations made even less sense than Pelys’s had.

“Or,” Desten said slowly, “like words which sound the same but are different.”

I let the line dissipate. “This isn’t working. I need to get back to practicing the shield.”

“Wait, please. One more thing. Just close your eyes and listen. Right. Correct, not wrong. Rite. A ritual or ceremonial observation. Write. Putting words together. But when taken on their own, you can’t tell them apart. That’s power. It’s me saying ‘rite’ without context. If I say we’ll be attending it, you’ll know what I mean, or if I say you’re correct, you’ll know a different meaning. But the sounds I said are the same.”

“So?”

“So, power is the same. You give it a form, and you give it a shape, and you give it a purpose. But if I add the ‘w’ before the ‘rite’ it stays the same in one dimension - it still sounds the same - yet changes the meaning. It’s the same with changing the solidity of your constructs.”

I sighed. “I don’t need to be able to change the solidity. I need to be able to duplicate this section into a complete protective sphere.”

“And you can do that. It’s all in your mindset.”

“No!” I snapped, opening my eyes. “No it isn’t. I’ve been twisting my mindset every which way for weeks, and nothing helps. If all I had to do was wish it into existence, I’d already be there. But I’m not, because there’s more to it. There’s something else, something deeper I’m missing.”

“And if you couldn’t make anything manifest at all, I might agree with you. But you’ve already done the complicated part! You can make the pattern correctly. Now all you need to do is replicate it into a broader form.”

“HOW?!” I shouted, then tensed, immediately expecting retaliation, ready to spin up my basic shield at a moment’s notice. Pelys would have immediately slammed some devastating attack into me in the attempt to force my power to manifest.

Desten wasn’t Pel. He backed down, shoulders slumping. Then he turned without another word and went back into the house.

I felt oddly like I should apologize, but frustration and anger drove me on. I wouldn’t slink back in, not yet.

I built up the shield section, slowly, precisely, until it sat fully formed beyond my outstretched hand. One tiny, perfect piece. Too small to be of any use on its own. It was so taxing to form even this small piece, I couldn’t fathom the focus required for a full shield.

But Pel needed me. Every day I failed to master this was another chance for Retti and Desten to do something terrible. I had to get this. It was important. Essential.

I tried spinning it out, making a vertical sweep of it, imagining all the little sections built up into an arc like the one that made up my basic shield. The piece stretched and cracked instead, twisting itself into a shape utterly unlike what I’d envisioned.

I relaxed the power back into myself, letting the construct dissolve. But though most of what Desten had said was nonsense, I’d seen for myself that his power could be used differently. I changed focus, switching back to the basic shield. Could I replicate his growing-flames method? The shield was as basic a construct as they came. It shouldn’t matter what method I used to create it.

I focused on pulling my power up through my body, ready to be used, then concentrated on the ground beneath my feet. A disc of power there, licking up like flames until it formed a complete sphere. It shouldn’t be too hard to replicate.

Except that for all the time I’d spent practicing how to push power out through my hands, the only thing I knew how to do from my feet was flight. Hmm. I could hover, but starting a shield there felt weird.

I considered pressing on, but shook the thought away. That was a digression I didn’t need. Instead I knelt and placed my hand on the ground by my feet, drawing the circle manually. The disc appeared and filled in, but when I tried to make it grow with flickering flames up the sides, it instead twisted and cracked.

I was missing something. Desten’s analogy might be nonsense, but it worked for him. It just didn’t work for me. Perhaps because he loved words, cared about them for more purposes than simply surviving. For me, writing was a task I performed because I was hired to do it, not because I had any particular affinity for it. For Desten, it was something akin to his purpose for existing. He had a cause, a goal, and writing his stupidly naive manifestos about people getting along was his way of pursuing that cause.

What did I have? What could I equate power to in a way I’d intuitively understand it? It wasn’t light, because it could be solid, but it wasn’t not-light either. I needed a way to stop thinking of it as two separate things, and instead as a single thing that could shift into different forms.

I stared up at the sky, watching heavy clouds drift by. Yellow lines of heat painted all along Desten 3’s garden walls kept the interior from freezing so his plants could flourish regardless of the weather outside, but there had been the occasional snowfall over the past week. It always melted to rain before reaching the streets or roofs, but beyond the artificial heat it drifted down in lazy flakes.

Snow…

It was solid. But when you held it in your hand, it became liquid. If you dropped that water on a frozen stone, it became solid again.

I shouldn’t be imagining my power as a wall of force or light, but like water that happens to glow. Water held in shape by the power of my will, freezing solid or melting at my command. Impermeable or liquid at my whim.

I spun up my shield, deliberately oblong so I could reach the interior, and tapped on it. Solid. Now melt it without destroying it. Liquify the construct without changing its shape.

I focused, concentrating on what I wanted to have happen, until I felt something shift just a little.

I tapped the shield again, and it felt like pressing against damp moss. My hand sank into it, then out the other side as I pressed harder. I quickly pulled my hand back, not wanting to imagine what would happen if I solidified it while I was part in and part out. Too late; I’d imagined it. Nope. I flicked my hand a few times to rid it of phantom pain, then returned my focus to where it belonged.

I’d managed a liquid form of my barrier. It wasn’t as transparent as the light version or as solid as the original version, which I decided to think of as ice from now on. It didn’t seem particularly useful, but it did prove that Desten hadn’t been completely wrong after all. I did need to change my mindset, just not in the ways he or Pel used.

And if my shield was liquid now …

I imagined my little section of dispersal shield, spread all across my bubble. Ten thousand little barbs ready to strike back at any attackers and rip their constructs apart. I knew what each should look like and how it should operate, down to the exact vibration speed. All I needed was to push the liquid shield into the right shape.

It resisted, trying to hold onto the oblong bubble shape I’d initially given it. No, I had to stop thinking of it as a separate entity. The thread of pink light connecting it to me meant it was part of me. It was a construct, it didn’t have a mind of its own. The only purpose it had was my purpose.

The power I currently held to the shape of a bubble around me began to ripple. I coaxed it to stretch, flowing smoothly without any twisting or cracks, back into a standard sphere. Then, holding my breath in anticipation, I pushed further. Thousands of tiny lumps puckered its surface, like shoots of grass trying to push out of the earth in spring. The mental image helped further, and the lumps sprouted barbs, uncoiling like fresh flower stems. They didn’t all move in unison, but in an uneven staggered flow as my focus drifted across the surface. Some grew to full clarity, others remained simple bumps until I turned my attention to them.

Half an hour later, I stood in the completed shield, joy and accomplishment swooping through my chest.

Finally, I’d done it! If Retti tried to control me again, this would tear her power to pieces before she got close.

I wouldn’t be useless any longer.