Micah’s memory was a chain missing a single link. It lasted from the moment they had encountered that hooded figure over the fissle fields to the moment Pijeru had cast their minds onto the plane of memories, their conversation with her there, and then up until he had left.

[Memory — a Battle, a Pact, a Feast].

Delilah’s memory was an anthology of torn-out pages. It lasted about an hour and a half in total, but the scenes were each between a few seconds to a few minutes long:

Delilah stood in a dim apartment and stared out the window at a raging sandstorm.

Delilah played with lesser spirits on the beach. The shallow waves splashed against her feet and the low clamor of the beachgoers filled the background.

Delilah stared up at a night sky full of unfamiliar stars. Again and again. In different years, different seasons, and different parts of that ruined world.

[Memory — Alien Stars].

There were treasures in there, of course, but it would take time to sort through it all. And the information to be gained was of the more esoteric sort, so the adults decided to invite her for a second meeting sometime soon.

Kyle … Kyle’s memory was sort of similar to Delilah’s. An anthology. Though his scenes were longer. Rather than seconds to minutes, they lasted minutes to hours. The individual memories were also similar to Micah’s. They had missing links—skipping over the boring parts.

But Micah had managed to preserve his memory with perfect clarity in a radius around himself. He hadn’t tried to overreach. He had captured a piece of the past like a little glass marble and pocketed it away.

Delilah’s memories were crisp and vivid. Almost too real. The stars in the night sky were more defined than anything Kyle had ever seen. But everything else faded into shadows like the audience before a stage, and the scenes the Registrar projected were from her point of view. Seeing through her eyes, hearing through her ears. Things that had stuck with her on a personal level.

In Kyle’s memories, they rode the tram and the people around him stood halfway in other bodies, in the walls, or on the blurry street outside. Street signs and fences whizzed by or shot through them. Everything within the tram was clear enough, but outside, every other building looked like a painted wall. Two-dimensional.

They dove off a cliff and the beach and promenade were full of vibrant people, but the city in the distance looked like a series of painted wooden planks.

They fought in a war. Pijeru levitated in the sky and hurled lamps and abandoned cars at great beasts of fire.

“Hold,” Chief Warrant Officer Dornan said and seven people crowded around the open hood of a car, studying its metallic innards. They hoped to reverse-engineer their technology from brief glimpses like this one.

The roads beneath Pijeru, the radio station she and her comrades had been tasked with repairing, the helicopters in the sky, and the path they had taken to get here, as well as the path they were about to take, those were all clear and detailed.

The other roads? The other buildings? The places Kyle hadn’t paid attention to or where nobody was?

The city was dotted with painted wooden shacks ten stories tall. Through cracks in the wood and cracks in the asphalt, they saw the featureless void beneath.

His memories then were a beating heart, roots that spread out from familiar faces, from lives.

[Memory — the Avashay].

Kyle’s Skill had crammed sixteen hours of content into his brain.

“There is no way we will be able to get through this all today.” Mrs. Dawes took in the active warzone with a daunted expression. A ruined city of sand, and ash, and rust.

“We will have to schedule another meeting,” Mr. Walker said. “Multiple sessions divided up over a few weeks … Ah! With your agreement, of course?”

Kyle quickly nodded and ducked his head when the attention fell on him.

His breath was shaky. He wasn’t quite sure why. When he glanced to his right, he saw his classmates looking at him with wide eyes.

When he turned to his left, that Registrar, Mr. Lenz, beamed. “It looks like we will be spending much more time together, Mr. Jonasson.”

The tram shuddered as it climbed a bridge across the river. Kyle rocked left and right and tightened his grip on the overhead strap.

Cathy, Delilah, and Sarah had claimed one of the group spots for four people—two cheap leather benches facing each other. They chatted like a coven of witches.

Andrew leaned against one of the dividers of horizontal slatted, lacquered wood.

Micah stood in the far corner near the exit with one of his patrons, a man with dirty blond hair. He held onto a strap and looked like he was forcing himself to be stern while he spoke down at him.

Micah sighed—a big sigh—and Kyle watched his lips to put words to the distant murmur he overheard: “ … this girl I liked …”

His other patron was a young woman with messy brown hair like a bouquet of wildflowers. She held onto the pole in the doorway to lean outside and slap the steel beams of the bridge in passing. But the moment Micah said that, she pulled herself in and leaned on the railing next to his seat with an interested smile.

“You never told us you were in a love triangle.”

They exchanged a few small words and Kyle saw as much as he heard the older man say: “ … attacked him from behind?”

The crickets chirped in his ears, loose splinters pierced the palm of his hand, and the flames baked his skin— Kyle felt a wave of nausea and looked the other way.

Ameryth stood on his other side. She and Mr. Walker guarded them against the two reporters who had snuck onto the train.

Tomorrow’s newspapers would make record sales, Kyle guessed, but these two were barking up the wrong tree. Their principals had told them as much, and one of them, at least, got the hint.

The tram slowed as it reached a crossing on the other side of the river, a road leading up a hill with a sparse crowd of pedestrians and people on bikes.

The reporter in his business suit hopped off while the tram was still moving, and he stumbled down the hill with his journal in hand.

Kyle remembered doors that shut on their own, sealing everyone in, and streets crammed with impatient cars. A city that was so, so loud. It was a nicer memory than his last one.

He breathed in the cool breeze that drifted from one open door to the next and looked out the window over the city. It was quarter past five. Early autumn, sunset was in about, what? Two hours? Three?

The sun had begun its descent, casting the sky in grays and hints of yellow where it peaked out between the clouds.

“What are you thinking about?” Ameryth asked him.

“Hadica,” Kyle said.

The City of the Harvest bloomed along the Great River and clustered in a circle around its Tower. From above, it loosely resembled a harvest sickle. Fitting. Their Gardens had made them the breadbasket of the Five Cities—or the ‘Tower League,’ if you wanted to sound old.

Ships and wagon loads of food and other goods departed from the city day and night. What they couldn’t harvest from the Tower, they grew.

The outer city was dotted with ranches to produce eggs and milk that were consumed by millions daily.

There were bloodless farms and orchards for people who couldn’t stomach the thought of eating food someone might have died for.

The hills to the northwest, around which the Great River curved, were lined with grapes and hops. Each of the Five Cities had its vineyards, distilleries, and breweries, of course—and the other cities’ drinks were respectable. Cute, but respectable.

Hadica and Trest, though? They nurtured a rivalry born from proximity and their shared waterways.

Trest reaped many blessings from its lands, but Hadica was the City of the Harvest, the City of Flowers.

The houses here were the color of clay and mud. The Great River flowed through the landlocked city and fed into a lattice of canals.

Most houses had windowsill railings to plant flower boxes on. When you moved into a house or an apartment, that was the housewarming gift, some flowers to fit into the neighborhood.

Hadica had parks, community gardens, rooftop gardens, and even in the most cramped central parts of the city, housing estates had shared gardens or narrow strips of green that ran around the building. Just enough space for a few hydrangeas or tomatoes.

Hadica had more Classes influenced by nature than any of the other cities. It blessed its own lands.

Well, that was the dream, at least. Kyle had seen the loot tents, the Bazaar, the world’s largest flea market. Over the course of one winter, one man had reshaped the countryside to the east by commanding thousands of [Harvesters]. Not [Gardeners]. This sickle city reaped far more food than it grew.

But even so, it could compete with blessings of its own: numbers. Hadica had the highest population of any of the Five Cities. One and a half million people lived in its immediate districts. They could outproduce Trest. Succeed with quality through quantity.

One and a half million people. Somewhere between seven and eight million people lived in the Five Cities. These five cities. Home.

“You’ve been living here for nine months,” Ameryth said. “What do you think?”

“It’s beautiful,” Kyle said. “It’s …” He let out a daunted breath. Memories pulsed like an open vein in the back of his mind. Ages gone and yet to come. “ … brand new.”

The tram shuddered again as one of the old city walls cast them into shadow.

Cathy, Delilah, and Sarah were headed back to the girls’ dorms together; Andrew for the Alchemists’ Guild to check on his boon feather.

Micah stood with his patrons off to the side. They craned their heads over a glassy blue flame in his cupped hands.

Kyle watched from afar with a twisted sense of nostalgia. He had stood with the group this morning. For a brief half-hour or so. A few hours later …

“Do you think you can squeeze in another visit to the hospital?” Ameryth asked. “The sooner we can study your new levels, the better. I know the good doctors will appreciate it.”

“The creep, too,” Kyle replied out of habit.

[Rogue].

[Geist-touched Rogue].

He hadn’t even known if he wanted the Class anymore and now it had changed. Did that mean he had doubled down? Would it be harder to consolidate?

“I, uh, still have some things I need to prepare for tomorrow.”

“You pushed your schoolwork up to the last minute?”

“I couldn’t have known this would happen. It took up my entire weekend.”

His last weekend of the summer break. Tomorrow morning, in fourteen hours, he would have to wake up early for the first day of the new school year. And he would have to do the same thing again every morning after that.

He could already feel the stress, like insects crawling on his skin. How many more weekends was he going to have to work with the Registry?

“You’ll be back before dinner is over.”

Kyle sighed, but he did have questions. There were things he remembered from that day that weren’t part of his memory Skill.

Micah noticed him looking from afar and waved. Kyle gave him an upward nod in response and left in the other direction.

“‘Geist,’ as in zeitgeist, I would imagine,” Doctor Sommerhorn explained. The scraggly man with thinning blond hair sat on a swivel chair to his left beside the examination table. “‘The spirit of the times,’” he said. “It has to do with culture.”

Kyle kept his arm steady while the doctor inspected his mark, and he kept his back straight while another man fussed over him.

He could still roll his eyes, though. “Great, so I’m a [Culture Rogue]? Even my Class is telling me I’m an idiot.”

“Geist-touched. Touched. Come now, boy, you may have Northern blood in you, but I know you are smarter than this. You are a [Culture-touched Rogue] of another name.”

“If what you told us was true … that would make sense,” Mr. Minnir said in a low, distracted tone as he fastened a strap around Kyle’s head. The cool wooden nubs on the inside of the cap pressed into his skull, and the man’s voice was right above his ear. It made his skin tingle. “ … considering how you obtained the Class …”

“Aliens,” Doctor Broun whispered. She leaned against the counter and looked vaguely at the ceiling as she pressed a pen into her face. It shoved her cheek and nose up.

Minnir’s eyes flickered toward her with concern, but Doctor Sommerhorn didn’t seem interested in the topic of the avashay at all. “I would hope to believe the culture in question is your nurture getting the better of your nature. This [Blooded Fighter] Class, on the other hand, how do we think you got that?”

“I, uh, don’t know what ‘blooded’ is supposed to mean either. I got hit pretty hard during the fight?”

“It could mean a great many things. We would have to consult a lexicologist to be sure, but the most obvious answer, in your case, should be that it is a synonym for [Sorcerous Fighter]. Yet you didn’t receive any other Skills at all?”

“Nope, uh …” Kyle hesitated and added, “My mark did grow?”

The doctor had been inspecting and measuring his hand for the past few minutes, but Kyle still regretted bringing his attention back toward it.

Sommerhorn gave him a blocky smile. “Yes, it did. A2, A3, A4; see here and here?” He slashed rough inky notations with a pen into his skin. “A few millimeters each. Our initial appraisal found a variety of new shades of essences throughout your body—that is normal for someone who recently leveled up in multiple Classes. However, the concentrations are unnaturally low. Even if your body processed your levels with startling efficiency, there should be more of them. The APG might confirm our suspicions about this ‘boon’ of yours”—Sommerhorn gestured at Minnir—”but I think, should we perform a similar test on your mark, we would find your [Blooded Fighter] essence concentrated in your hand.”

“So I dumped my [Blooded Fighter] level up into my mark,” Kyle translated after a moment’s hesitation. He supposed deepening his pool of regeneration was always useful. It was a Skill most fighters got around level twenty after all.

“Possibly!” the doctor said. “If so, good. That is the best thing you can be doing for science and your nation.” He said the second part like an afterthought. “We sadly do not have access to a spell that could analyze your mark with the same accuracy as the APG—”

“I’m working on it,” Minnir mumbled.

“—yet. So we will have to wait on your blood work to be sure of anything.” He craned his neck back to glance at Doctor Broun.

“Ghost aliens,” the pathologist said. She perked up when she noticed their looks, but Sommerhorn had already shaken his head and turned away.

The rough nail of his thumb dug into Kyle’s wrist to tilt his hand left and right, and his eyes gleamed as they tracked the lines of his life mark.

As always, whenever the surgeon looked at him, Kyle felt like a slab of meat on ice.

“And nothing else occurred that might have given cause to your new Class?” he mused aloud.

“Uhh, there was one—”

“Done!” Minnir said and straightened up.

Kyle looked up, then tugged his arm away. It took Sommerhorn a moment too long to let go of him.

He met his eyes with a smile and rolled away to note down his observations in a barely legible scrawl. He put his shoe up on his other knee and with one hand gestured, Continue.

Mr. Minnir pulled a chair over and planted himself in front of Kyle. His voice returned now that he was done with his preparations. “Okay, so we are going to perform an APG on you. What does that mean? Well, it stands for arcane-psycho-gram, which is a type of specialized appraisal spell that lets us take a peek at the magic of your mind.

“Now—and the Registrars probably gave you a similar spiel this morning—does this mean we will be reading your thoughts? And the answer to that is: no. If you want, you can imagine your mind like a crowded room, okay? We just want to observe the crowds, how they move, which groups they form, how those groups interact, how they react, which are the loudest, what color clothes they wear … That does not mean we can understand what they are saying.”

He gave Kyle an intense look, and Kyle nodded to show he understood. Mr. Minnir wasn’t a doctor. He was a [Medical Diviner], and he often sounded like he was imitating the doctors who would usually give these speeches.

Medical diviners learned a variety of appraisal spells that doctors didn’t have the time, aptitude, or sheer levels to learn. So when a fresh level twenty-five [Doctor] needed tests done, they would call on someone like him to perform them similar to how pathologists used odd machines and chemicals, or how house doctors used those inflatable armbands to measure blood pressure—he was an expensive piece of equipment for the hospital to use.

But much like nurses, he’d learned enough about medicine to cast his spells, and he had probably picked up a ton of knowledge throughout the years.

He was just a little shaky when it came to dealing with patients on his own. Neither Broun nor Sommerhorn was about to toss him a bone, that was for sure.

“So our goal is, as Doctor Sommerhorn already mentioned, to find those missing essences. We have to track what each of your levels does so we can separate them from your inherent sorcerous abilities. What with this boon you received and your suspicions that this lady might have cast your minds onto a different plane, your mind seems like a good first bet.

“Our secondary goal is to see if you were maybe exposed to any planar essences.”

“Ooh!” Doctor Broun perked up. “Those would be interesting to study. Uh, it would be suboptimal for us, though.”

Kyle frowned. “Planar essences?”

“Yes, they are potent forms of magic more commonly found on other planes that, uh … They’re still rare, mind you. But sometimes when we travel to other planes, we might get exposed to them through one means or another …”

He didn’t sound completely sure about the facts himself, but the concern behind his words was earnest.

“And that’s bad?”

“Not bad, per se. This ‘boon’ you received was likely potent magic as well. That is why it can grant you permanent abilities unlike, say, eating a fire crystal. So planar essence can leave an impact, okay? For better or for worse. Just look at our Archwizard of Exploration. The most important thing we need to figure out is: were you exposed to any planar essences and, if so, did it affect your sorcery?”

“Oh, because then—”

“Then you would no longer be a valid test subject, yes.”

Shit. Kyle had known that, but he hadn’t actually believed it was much of a risk. He had only mentioned it to Ameryth as an excuse to give up his boon feather to her.

If that tiny memory boon he had gotten from Pijeru got him kicked out from the study that was financing his full scholarship …

“Alas, we run that risk every time our subjects level,” Doctor Sommerhorn said, “their individuality inevitably makes them useless for most of our research. I have high hopes for your [Blooded Fighter] Class though.”

“My [Blooded Fighter] Class …?” Kyle repeated like it was a lifeline.

“Focus? Please?” Minnir cut in. “We don’t know anything for sure yet, okay? I need you to relax, take a deep breath, and try not to resist the spell. These”—he tapped the loose cap on Kyle’s head—”will help, but not as much as your cooperation.”

A few dozen wooden nubs dug into his scalp. They were made of spellwood, like dozens of wands pointed at his brain. Thick cords trailed down his neck and connected to a wooden puzzle box on a table. Minnir’s spellbook lay on one side of the box, and a roll of paper and four wooden pens with black crystals embedded in them lay on the other side.

Kyle did as he was told and tried to relax while Minnir consulted his spellbook and assembled the spell.

The pens levitated into the air, the paper rolled on its own, trailing onto the floor, and the animated equipment began to take notes.

“Now, I’d like you to picture the boon this lady gave you,” the man instructed him. “What did it look like? Did it have any sounds or smells that you can recall vividly? What did its magic feel like to you?”

It took over twenty minutes to finish the test. Mr. Minnir prompted him with questions, getting him to think about different topics, experiences, and feelings. He cast a few spells to communicate concepts directly to his mind, too, similar to Cathy’s [Signal] spell.

The two doctors both left and came back in that time, and Ameryth checked in to ask how much longer it would be before she hurried off again.

The adults checked the notations on the pile of paper, and all three of them brightened. “Good news,” Minnir said, “as we suspected, the vast majority of the essences from your [Geist-touched Rogue] Class and these unknown essences—your boon, perhaps—are concentrated within your brain and mental spirit, and your mental spirit respectively.”

“If you were a mage,” Doctor Broun told him, “I’d tell you to expect minor changes to how your mana behaves, but that’s not really a concern for you, is it?”

Kyle frowned. “And my mark?”

“As Doctor Sommerhorn said, we’ll need your blood to be sure, but there shouldn’t be much of this level up leftover to affect it in any major ways.”

“And uh, the planar essences?”

Minnir had begun to gather up the pile of paper, but the reminder gave him pause. “Right. No idea. I didn’t detect any planar essence currently in you, but you were definitely exposed to some pretty potent magic. Whether or not that was planar essences or this boon, or if there is a difference, I can’t say.

“What I can say is that only your mental spirit was affected, unlike your [Geist-touched Rogue] Class, which also expended some of itself to affect both your mental spirit and physical brain. If your mind was the only thing that got sent to this other plane, I think it’s safe to assume your mark should have been unaffected by the boon as well—Northern tattoos and their mental spirits are only loosely connected. But—”

“Blood work,” Kyle repeated.

“Exactly.”

“That’s my cue,” Doctor Broun said and rolled a familiar machine over.

“That’s your cue?” Minnir asked. “So you missed it the first ten times we mentioned it?”

She rolled her eyes with a smile and began to set up her equipment. Kyle was much more used to this process. He offered up his arm and waited for the needle.

“You know the drill,” she said, “but we have to go through it every time. We’re going to be taking a liter of your blood. I will be using a Skill to help drain your mark consistently, so it will only be able to heal you in a limited capacity. Even so, your regeneration is a process and it needs resources to work with, so you might feel a little woozy, disoriented, cold, or irritable …”

He only listened with one ear. He had heard this speech often enough—every time he came to visit.

His eyes wandered to the clock on the wall, its hands ticking by. He doubted he’d make it back in time for dinner, which meant buying something on the way back, but that was probably a good thing. Cafeteria food was best consumed in small doses and he always had an appetite after his hospital visits.

His eyes flickered to his arm just before Doctor Broun pierced his vein, and Sommerhorn caught his eye.

“What were you about to say earlier? ‘There was one …’ what?”

“Oh. Uh, during the fight. I was bleeding and … I don’t know. I felt like I pushed the magic from my mark into the enchanted axe I was wielding?”

He felt stupid saying it because he had no clue what he was talking about, but the feeling was overshadowed by a pang of loss at the broken item. The fire axe had been cool.

“And?” the man asked.

“And the enchantment flared back to life with more power. Way more power.”

Doctor Sommerhorn scoffed, a dismissive gesture as he turned back to his notes, but it seemed like a reflex reaction. His head immediately tilted back up to glance at Kyle with a frown as some thought caught his attention.

“Sounds like resonance,” Mr. Minnir said.

“Yes,” the man agreed, “it does.”

“Resonance like what makes magic items more powerful? And buffs?” Kyle asked. He slowly moved his eyes over to Minnir, who was packing up his equipment. “Would that help with appraisal spells?”

His movements slowed and he said in a considerate tone, “It could.”

“So is that something I could train somehow …? How?” If it could help keep his scholarship, that was one thing, but if he could replicate that power boost in combat? He had lopped the Ape’s tentacle off with that axe.

Doctor Sommerhorn sat up with interest. “It’s simple. You would want to replicate the conditions in which the phenomenon occurred.” He counted off his fingers. “Step one, meditate on the occurrence. Recall all the relevant details. Step two, buy some magic items similar to the axe you wielded. Step three, start bleeding. Step four, try to empower an item. And step five, review and revise.”

Kyle’s jaw went slack. “Oh.”