The young man stood at a grassy precipice over a sea of fog. His chest was chiseled of inlaid yellow crystal. A dim pink light dyed it amber from where it pulsed within like a tiny heart.

A metallic dragon scale tattoo ran up the base of his throat like a high collar, over his shoulders, and down his arms and the sides of his torso. It slipped beneath his sleeveless shirt and peeked out above the hem of his pants.

A smaller patch of iridescent plumage was tattooed around his Adam’s apple like ruffles, curving around the back of his neck and ears. Its feathers shimmered green, purple, and blue.

The mists were painted in shades of gold and green, promising the unknown; the sky painted silver and orange, fading into a starry night.

His hair blew in the wind, and the fog and grass rolled. He held a spear in hand and the setting sun in his eyes.

Below him, nondescript figures stood on that hill in the shadowed corners.

[Drake], the painting said.

“Is that supposed to be me?”

Sure, he wore sleeveless shirts sometimes, but not in the Tower. He guessed that was where this scenery was supposed to be anyway.

“Put on some armor, dude! And who would be dumb enough to get tattoos in color!? Might as well hold a sign that says, ‘Please kick my teeth in.’”

He almost thought the [Drake] in the painting shifted to give him side-eye, but Ryan was just joshing around. He laughed with tears in his eyes and thrust his arms up triumphantly. “That’s me!”

His [Mage] and [Scout] paintings were gone. He was sad to see them go, but, in a way, they lived on in here. The night sky was still there. His hair was mussed by the wind. He looked ready to dive off that cliff, and his tattoos looked magical. The entire image did. A rainbow sheen covered it, and it shifted like a spellbook when he moved.

Consolidated.

Ryan stepped closer to inspect the details— then spun around as quickly as he could, glancing left, right, up, down, at the Salamander island, the bonfire, the Honey Ant road, and the bird tree.

Nothing. The silver road which circled his giant self was still. The void stretched on infinitely.

Sometimes, Ryan thought he caught a hint of unfamiliar movement in here, in the corners of his eyes, and since he didn’t paint his Classes himself … but no, there wasn’t anybody around who shouldn’t have been here.

He turned back and inspected the painting in detail for real this time.

Some of the shapes in the mists hinted at forests, ancient ruins, and cave entrances.

One of the nondescript shadows wasn’t black but a dark inky shade of blue. Another one was pink. Was that supposed to be Lisa?

He looked back and forth between his giant self and the [Drake] self to spot any differences, flexed his muscles, and hopped up and down with a hand held out from the top of his head.

The painting was huge. The [Drake] ‘stood’ at a higher elevation than him but … the gaps between their feet and the tops of their heads didn’t match up.

“Are you … shorter than me? How does that work? Will I stop growing taller if I level you? Aren’t you supposed to be a tall and mighty hero, huh? Damnit …”

He supposed even magic had to cut corners to appease physics.

“At least I still have—“ He turned and paused when he spotted the small, darker painting across the void. “… you.”

[Fighter]. Its painting was definitely shorter now, only level two. Two levels that had refused to consolidate.

Ryan hesitated, then left. He considered leaving entirely. Tomorrow was the first day of school and he had a report to write to complete Jason’s quest for the guild, and letters of his own to write to his parents. He also wanted to refresh himself on some of the curriculum and get a nice long workout in. Maybe try out his new Skills?

But his feet carried him along the silvered path until he stood in front of that darker painting.

This [Fighter] Ryan was younger, smaller, arms straining to hold the weight of a sword in his hands. He looked haggard and stood tall in defiance of the creeping darkness all around him. Splashes of ink suggested tooth and claw, branches and spiderwebs, pointing fingers, disappointed eyes, hateful words.

And he wasn’t alone. Another nondescript figure was barely visible in the darkness at his side.

[Fighter], this painting said. Somebody who fought in spite of his fears.

“Is that supposed to be me?”

A line split down the painting, slicing through his arm. And with a silent click, a door cracked open in the center of his Class.

Heart thumping in his throat, Ryan leaned to the right and peered through the gap.

The void waited beyond. The same void that was all around him. Nothing new.

Except, a few silvery wisps broke off from the argent path beneath his feet and escaped through the doorway.

“Oh,” Ryan realized. “If I walk through this door, I will discover a [Fighter Path], won’t I? Or, no, not that. A Path for whatever part of you I couldn’t consolidate. That I couldn’t leave behind. [Bravery Path]?”

It would give him a new Skill, he knew, and make fighting more intuitive.

Ryan didn’t have a combat Path. His parents hadn’t known what to make of the only true Path he did have, [Exemplarism Path], except that he could mimic beasts. And that was a [Monster Mage] ability, right?

So they had brought him to a school so he could learn to fight, so he could go into the Tower. He had met Gardener and the man had put a sword in his hands and told him he expected great things.

Two years later, Ryan was a level eight [Fighter] who was applying to climbing schools and still didn’t have a combat Path. But his classmates did. And they set the bar for him to raise.

“You would help me get better grades, help me protect my friends … do what they want me to do? Even if you could help me do what I want to do, that’s not what’s going to happen, is it? Look at yourself! You’re level two, dipshit. You’re too weak to change me. I’d slip up and use you like a combat Path and nothing else. I don’t even know if I want you to help me do anything else.”

The door had cut the [Fighter] off from that figure at his side, and it was better that way.

He looked to his right at that giant shining idol of a fantastical hero at the precipice to the unknown, his friends at his back, one step away from adventure.

And then he reached out and shut that door.

Whatever you do, don’t disappoint your mother.

The painting resealed and flickered. The shadows drew inward. The [Fighter] hunched his shoulders and lowered his arms as his eyes darted left and right, afraid and alone in the dark.

[Fighter], this painting still said, like a synonym for [Coward]. “That’s also me.”

Ryan wasn’t somebody who fought in spite of his fears, but somebody who fought because of them, because he didn’t know anything else.

Not yet.

He turned and left the coward to fend for himself. “[Drake] is good enou—”

Something clicked.

At the edge of the central circle, Ryan paused and turned around. The door had popped back open. And in the corner of his eye, four glassy fingers slipped back into the void.

He woke up.

They finished distributing their loot while they discussed the details of what Lisa wanted him to do: somehow, use his [Exemplarism Path] to heal and alter the Draconic Salamanders.

“From what you told me, your paintings are the same thing: concepts structured into magical effects,” Lisa said. “All you need to do is focus your Path outward instead of inward. That’s possible. There are meditation exercises for that. Most of the ones I found are for teachers to apply their Paths to their students, but still.”

Ryan nodded absent-mindedly while he counted coins and swept them off the table into a drawstring pouch.

“You have a weird Path, man,” Frederick said. “How do you turn painting stuff in your brain into buffs? Super weird.”

Sion spoke with a subtle note of hesitation when he glanced at Ryan. “I have met people who described their Paths as palaces in their minds. It’s similar to gamutry, isn’t it? Using self-expression as a medium to channel magic.”

“Paladin convictions are similar,” Anne said. “Acting consistently can create a passive buff if you do it right. For example, always telling the truth makes me hit harder.”

“Sh—oot,” Frederick caught himself from cursing and shot her a surprised look. “Are you serious?”

“Yes. It has to do with belief, sort of—”

“It’s not like I believe in Teacup Salamanders,” Ryan mumbled without looking away, and his index finger froze on an iron penny because something about his own words didn’t ring quite true to himself. And wasn’t that the damnedest thing?

Do I believe in Teacup Salamanders?

He shook his head. “Freddi’s right. I’m just weird.”

“A lord!?” Niva exclaimed from the doorway into the kitchen.

They had stood up to stretch their feet and so Lisa could get her stuff from her room—she stormed up the stairs and back down as quickly as she could—and of course, Navid had saddled them with the task of swapping pennies while he rubbed elbows with the sages.

“Oh, my name is Niva Tinner, of no house and nowhere important. It is a pleasure to meet you, milord Madin of Hadica.”

“Please, you’re embarrassing me. It’s just a title. What is truly exciting is meeting you. I feel as though I am drinking lemonade with archmages.”

“Archmages? Ha! I wish. I’m merely an [Elementalist], an [Elementalist of the Wilds] in fact. I’m barely over level thirty; I can barely throw a [Fireball].” She laughed, and the lie seemed obvious to Ryan, but when he glanced over, Navid just chuckled good-naturedly.

Jason and Frederick were the first to leave. They promised to keep them informed about any progress they made on the familiars and to go climbing together again someday soon.

”It was fun,” Frederick said. “Well, it was hell, but that’s what was so fun about it.”

“I’m going to spend a few hours just browsing the Bazaar for set items,” Jason said, “to see if I can find something that meshes with what I already have, or maybe just experiment with what kinds of effects I can create.”

“Have you figured out what your gambeson and your greaves do together yet?”

“Uh, a little sun pops up on my gambeson when I wear them together, but all it does is point toward sunlight, and I have to cran my head around to even see where it is pointing, so …”

“Like a weed in a cave.” Frederick clapped him on the shoulder and headed out the door first, frowning at the sunlight and then at the chickens.

“Not to be rude, but … does your gambeson even do anything? Other than match the color of the sky?”

“That’s just a visual effect. The main enchantment helps stabilize spells that are cast on me, like resonance but focused on, uh, mana efficiency and spell duration. An acquaintance recommended I buy it because [Adventurers] use a lot of buffs and I already have [Lesser Resonance].”

Huh. Ryan wondered if an enchantment like that would work with his new [Flamescale Armor]. “What’s the rest of its set do?”

“I don’t know. Guessing by it, something to do with time? Timekeeping? Astronomy?” He shrugged and broke into a giddy smile—or the closest thing to giddy the lanky guy could manage. “It doesn’t matter, though, does it? All items are part of one giant set for me now. [Cross-set Synergy],” he said with a happy sigh.

Jason had seemed kind of grumpy when Ryan had met him during summer break. He had always struggled to fit in, but he’d been in a much better mood this last week.

He was glad. Challenging the Theatre had put them both back on their feet with their right foot forward, it seemed.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Ryan promised. “Have you tried out anything yet? Do you know what kind of items mesh well in case I come across something?”

“Yeah, my roommate let me borrow a pair of those Salamander gloves. The synergy gave me a kind of … crude flame shaping enchantment, I guess. Similar to Kyle’s axe?” He gestured vaguely. “I don’t think they synergized with my sundance greaves. I can feel the Skill working. The connection felt … frayed? Leaky? I’ll have to experiment more to figure it out.” He glanced at the gate as if he were itching to do just that. Right now.

Ryan held a fist out. It took Jason a moment to react before he bumped it. “See you later then.”

Navid and Sion were the second pair to leave. Sion and Anne had had plans for tomorrow, but Aber told them Lisa’s family was planning to visit hers tomorrow so she had to cancel.

They talked for a few minutes in the courtyard alone before he left. About their plans? Their families? Rescheduling?

Ryan didn’t listen in.

Navid finally collected his share of the money and asked Lisa, “Say, were you planning on extending this proposition to anyone else?”

“Micah and Myra mainly,” Lisa said, “but if you have suggestions, I’m all ears. I want to find partners for as many of them as I can.”

“No suggestions, no. Although I will think about it. I just wanted to warn you: maybe don’t extend your offer to anyone else until you are certain this will work? I trust you. If you told me you were planning on flying to the moon, I would ask when so I could set up a telescope, but this isn’t on you. This idea hinges on Ryan—and not that I don’t trust you, Ryan”—he held a hand out in placation—“but this was not your brainchild. You have never done something like this before. That’s a lot of pressure to put on one person. If this fails, the only people who will be disappointed now are you and Frederick … and me, a little. I already have a ritual of binding in mind for if this succeeds. But there is no merit in adding on to that pressure or the possible disappointment.”

For once, Lisa looked taken aback by his words. She considered and replied, “I figured the sooner I told them, the sooner they could prepare?”

“I’m sure you and your wonderful family could help the others pick out appropriate bindings and bonds.”

“So you’d want a familiar?” Ryan asked because he wasn’t sure about the idea himself. Why would Navid want one?

He shrugged. “I know enough people who have ones that it does not seem so strange and … having a personal assistant whom I can delegate work to?”

Lisa groaned, and Ryan was right there with her.

“Speaking of,” Navid said when Niva joined them again, “I couldn’t help but notice none of you have familiars?”

“Ah.” She laughed nervously. “Well, the thing about familiars is … uh … Huh. Wait, why don’t we have familiars?” She turned back to the kitchen, and the three adults within gave her unimpressed looks.

The short, red-headed man gestured something with his hands, and Niva ducked her head as if he had just said something to her.

… had he just said something to her?

Ryan leaned over to Lisa and whispered, “Is he mute?”

She looked at him like he was an idiot.

Sion had to practically drag Navid away because the young lord kept finding conversational topics to bring up on the way out of the door, and he insisted on trying to get Lisa’s family to visit his family, too. All he got were platitudes. So he left in disgrace, and shame, and failure eternal on his house and name, and a private carriage that pulled up for him before he could make it halfway down the road.

Then it was just Anne and him, and Lisa introduced them to Viglif once more. Properly this time.

They stood in the courtyard as Ryan watched vertical seams split down the young man’s skin, each a few centimeters apart. Then his head—his pale red hair, his scalp, his stern expression, his lips, and teeth, and jaw, and neck—parted into stripes. They unfurled, revealing a squat beige mushroom man within. Free of its confinement, his mushroom cap puffed outward with a shower of spores.

Ryan stared. For a long moment. It may have been a minute. He swallowed the screams that bubbled up in his throat and crushed the spasms that shot through his limbs, urging him to run or grab a spear.

The skin suit writhed where it hung like a sweater around his waist. Its insides were a mesh of bright red, overlapping tubes and white lines, like lichen or some of the paintings of ocean corals Ryan had seen once before.

He took the time to get past the horror at seeing a person bloom like a flower—

What.

What!?

Ahhh!, his brain screamed.

—and then he thrust his arm out at Lisa’s cousin, or friend, or neighbor, or whatever he was—family—and he said, “Hey, my name is Ryan. It’s terrific to meet you.”

He did not say ‘nice.’

Viglif signed something before shaking his hand with a surprisingly crushing grip. His ‘skin’ had a trace of that odd, greasy quality of damp button mushrooms, washed and freshly dried before cooking. And this close, that cold earthy smell was intense.

Lisa translated, “He says his name is Viglif, and that it’s nice to meet you, too.”

Anne stepped up next. She signed something before she held out her hand, and Viglif rocked back in surprise. He signed something back, so short and brief Ryan thought he could guess the meaning if it was anywhere close to his own thoughts, You know sign language!?

“A bit,” Anne said as she stumbled her way through the gestures, as if voicing the words out loud would help her remember. “A little bit. Garen taught me a little?”

Viglif shook her hand with far more enthusiasm, and Ryan couldn’t help but feel like he had made a bad first impression.

He wanted to join the conversation. He wanted to introduce himself to Lisa’s mom properly and ask her about what life in the Witch’s Forest was like. With the others gone, they could speak openly about these things. But Lisa poked him in the arm, and the gesture was so awkward and hesitant that it pulled Ryan right back out of his thoughts.

“So, uh, Ryan. My family wanted me to ask you if you would want to, uhm, demonstrate your new Skills for them?”

“Hah?”

Her mom walked over and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Much of what we do, aside from our research, is managing the forest we live in. Among our duties is preventing drakes from razing border towns and villages. Seeing as you are a human [Drake], we are merely curious to see how your magic compares.”

“Oh, so you’re like magical foresters?” Immediately, Ryan thought of the scout leaders and rangers who had trained him at camp this summer. If he pictured Lisa’s mom in that role, it made her seem much more approachable. “Uh, isn’t that dangerous? Putting yourselves between drakes and villages? How do you do that? Do you try to scare them off, or capture and release, or …?”

Maybe he imagined it, but Ryan thought he saw a hint of tension rise and immediately leave the woman’s expression when he asked those questions.

At least, he definitely saw that in Lisa. He kept one eye on her to gauge her reaction in case he said or did anything wrong. Her tension had spiked. For her mom, though, it wasn’t so much ‘tension’ as it was her ignoring him for one heartbeat. He asked, ‘Do you try to scare them off, or—,’ and her eyes went blank as if she’d suddenly lost all interest in their conversation. Then he said, ‘capture and release,’ and the light rekindled.

He could have guessed from how Lisa acted that dragons were a sensitive topic for her family—she’d wanted to save the Draconic Salamanders—but her family had also helped Garen slay a dragon, so Ryan didn’t know what to say or not say.

“The forest itself is deadly. A brush with the wrong plant or a simple insect bite can be a death sentence for the careless wanderer,” her mom explained like a tour guide. “With careful preparation and experience, however, even herding drakes in the Witch’s Forest can be little more than a chore.” A bit of amusement crept into her voice. “Describing us as foresters would be apt. Much better than being referred to as nebulous ‘sages.’ The things we do are relatively simple.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean— The things Lisa does are amazing,” Ryan rushed to say, “and I know she learned most of it from you, so relative to where I’m standing, sage is really really apt.”

“You flatter,” she said with a glimmer of suspicion in her eyes, and not the amused kind.

Ryan immediately cringed at his own words. Worse than the awkward fanboy he had been around Garen, he worried he would come off as some sort of sycophant.

But what she said was, “What sort of things does Lisa do?”

“Huh? Oh, she is amazing. She can cast any spell she wants on the fly and she is a [Summoner] so that’s even more impressive. I know— Well, I don’t know, but I’ve been told summoning is one of the hardest forms of magic. The only summoning spell I ever tried to learn was to conjure a swarm of lightning bugs and I still can’t cast it. The other day, Lisa conjured two true Salamanders like that.” He snapped. “And she doesn’t even have a spell to do that. She also created Sam and—“

Ryan blathered on with a growing frown as he tried to put his feelings into words. But just listing all the cool things Lisa could do made him feel like he was circling around what he wanted to say.

He ran out of steam, paused for a moment, and considered.

“She’s like a rock. No, because she moves. A river? Dams exist— I don’t know. It’s like, once she puts her mind to something, she never stops moving toward her goal, no matter how long it takes. Before he left, Navid said that if Lisa wanted to fly to the moon, he would ask her when so he could set up a telescope. I don’t think Lisa would know when, but I’d see her walking around with tarps and sticks and random engineering books because she’s building a hot air balloon in her free time, over months, while finding the time to get amazing grades, hang out, and help us.”

Lisa was blushing but with a slight frown. She looked at him as if she didn’t recognize him.

Ryan met her eyes, unrepentant. She was older than him and had repeated a school year. He didn’t always think about that, especially now since he had grown taller. But even if he didn’t always have that tidbit of information in his mind, it was hard to think of Lisa as a peer.

To see her with her family, flustered at compliments and jokes alike, it made her uniquely human.

Of course, he didn’t look away.

But the others snickered, and Ryan realized they had paused their conversation to listen in. Viglif signed something that made everyone but Anne and him laugh.

Lisa yelled, “I would not.”

Ryan asked. “What? What did you say?”

The myconid slapped the back of his hand against Aber’s chest and he translated, “He says Lisa would try to ride a balloon into space—and yes, she would.”

“Shaddup.”

Oh. In the hubbub, Ryan hoped nobody noticed his own blush.

Had that been a stupid idea? It had been the first thing that had come to mind while he had been rambling. How else would you get into outer space?

“Did she teach you anything?” her mom asked casually.

He replied without thinking, caught in the flow of the conversation. “No. Yes? I mean, we spar and she gives me pointers, but when she tried to teach me her magic, I uh … didn’t take the lessons very well.”

“You painted me,” Lisa said as if she had just realized something, then tried to brush it off as a jibe at him. “I mean, instead of learning the lesson.”

“Do you paint?”

“I meant on his Path, mom. I explained that, remember?”

“Ahh, I see.”

They looked at him, and Ryan felt like he was being scrutinized, but he didn’t understand how or why.

Desperate to keep the conversation going, he said, “Micah took much better to her lessons.”

“Micah?”

“He’s not here today,” Lisa said. “He’s spending the weekend with family.”

She nodded instantly and without question as if that statement explained Gods and the earth.

“So how about that demonstration of your magic then?”

“Fire breath!” Niva shouted from the sidelines. “Show us your fire breath!”

They cleared a space for him. Anne, Viglif, and now Aber chatted together in the shade of the walkway, watching with one eye. Viglif had actually tied his skin suit around his waist like a pulsing sweater, which Ryan tried to put out of his mind.

Lisa and her mom stood together a little ways off, and Niva and the silent man, Faer, positioned themselves on opposite ends of the courtyard.

“You can go all out!” she assured him. “We’ll make sure nothing catches on fire!”

Okay, Ryan thought, no pressure, right?

Why did this make him feel more nervous than Lisa’s insane plan? He wished for a moment Navid and the others were still here to distract her family, but he hadn’t been idle this week. Despite the hectic of the new school year—and finding out there were freaking aliens in their Tower—Ryan had found the time to linger in the gym a few minutes past curfew and test out his new Skills when nobody was around.

He had already done it once, right after leaving the Theatre, but he had been exhausted then. Still, his instincts had been right.

As before, so again: Ryan drew on his nervous emotions and the Teacup Salamanders in his mind. He drew on that great bonfire and the constellations of beasts running rampant through a night sky that grazed the inside of his skull. And, in much the same way Lisa had tried to teach him to do with the magic of his innards, he crushed it all down into a spark within his chest. It twitched and bulged on its way up his throat.

Ryan drew back and when the spark of magic left his gullet, he breathed fire.

The flames rolled out in a wide cone over the dirt of the courtyard, half as wide as his [Swathe of Flames] where it began, and not as ‘tall.‘ Everything beneath his nose was consumed by fire. It left the top half of his head exposed. But it reached further, over six meters past where Niva stood, and it had substance.

He kept the attack up, flames pouring out of him with rising intensity over a few seconds while his mana burned like tinder. When he stopped to catch his breath, the flames continued to curl in on themselves as they rose toward the sun.

The heat curled back toward him, too, and his face broke into a sweat as if he’d poked his nose into an oven.

Niva parted the fire to the left and right of herself and hopped on her feet. It took a moment for the roar and flapping of the flames to clear before he realized what she was doing: suppressing a squeal.

“That. Was. Adorable!”

“Huh?”

“You really are like a widdle drake.”

“Niva,” Lisa warned her.

“What?”

Ryan glanced around. All of her family members looked much the same: unimpressed, charmed, or amused. Mostly, they looked like they were trying to be polite.

Sam, at least, ran out to chase the dying flames. He spun and stared up at Ryan with big eyes.

Ryan smiled gratefully, but a self-pitying voice inside him said, Great. Teacup Salamanders think I’m impressive.

“It’s, uh—” he mumbled and spoke up, “It’s stronger when I use the armor at the same time?”

“How do you mean?” Lisa asked. “How does the armor help?”

“Don’t answer that. Show us, show us!”

Ryan obliged because he didn’t know the answer himself—he’d sort of stumbled onto the phenomenon while pretending to be a dragon knight—but he felt that would do his armor an injustice. It demanded an explanation, and they did want to study his Skills?

He walked and talked, releasing mana to conjure a gray swirl around his hand.

He looked mostly at Lisa while he explained because anything else would have been weird. “So, uh, my [Flamescale Armor] consolidated [Hot Skin], [Lesser Fire Resistance], and [Thick Skin]. And like them, it’s always on, you just can’t see it.”

He moved the mana output and the gray swirl wandered up his arm, little more than a smoke stain on a window with specs of other colors within. If he watched long enough, he caught impressions of scale patterns.

“I can see it,” Anne said. “I’m not sure about the rest of you …?”

They nodded.

Oh. Wow. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t as invisible after all.

“Well, I could control [Hot Skin] a little, making it stronger or weaker, sort of like a slider on a lamp. I can do the same with my armor, but I also have another slider for controlling where, and it has like … an opening for fuel. It eats fire and fire magic, and similar stuff, so uh— Lisa can you throw a [Firebolt] at me, please? A weak one?”

The firebolt she tossed was pitiful, little more than an ember. It struck his arm and, for a second, the gray swirl solidified into a patch of scales like red clay with a candlelight glow, orange and blue.

“Ha! See? So the armor blocks what it can and it sort of … eats the dissipating fire magic as fuel.” Ryan grinned. He still couldn’t get over how awesome it was to suddenly be able to conjure enchanted armor on his own.

“But if there is no fire, I have to feed it, and I only have so much mana. I can only use so much mana at once. So I can empower like, half of the armor a little.”

He spread his arms out, showing off the swirling smudge that surrounded his torso, up to his jaw, and halfway to his knees like a second gambeson.

“Then it’s strong enough to help block physical blows and stronger fire magic, I’m guessing, so it has an easier time eating? I can shift that around a bit.”

He pulled the mana back to cover just his torso like scalemail, and the magic was so dense it almost looked physical.

“Or, I can concentrate all of it into one piece.”

Now for the hard part. Ryan pushed the mana up and out from a pair of mana channels he hadn’t ever used until a week ago: the twin channels that ran up his neck, left and right behind his ears, and looped around his skull, forming what his textbooks referred to as the ‘enchanter’s crown.’

He suddenly felt as though he’d grown antlers. Ryan concentrated on those twin streams until his vision began to smudge with faint distortions. Like the tip of his nose, he couldn’t actually see his armor from the inside. Until he focused his vision on it. Then, a warm glow surrounded him and he looked up at hollow ridges like the inside of an alligator’s snout or a wolf with its hackles raised. He looked out through the ‘nose holes’ of the dragon head helmet, its maw extending a few inches at his eye level.

He kept pushing and the helmet became clearer. It looked physical and gained detailed embellishments. Stylized red metal and leather straps. Long ears, or maybe they were antennas, and pointed edges like teeth.

The strain set in and he began to meet diminishing returns.

Ryan could feel the Skill. He was pretty sure he’d only conjured a little over half of what the helmet could be, but it needed more magic than he could give, so he eased up. Reluctantly.

“I think that’s my limit,” he mumbled as the helmet lost a few of its details, then immediately raised his head with a smile again. “But watch what happens when I do this!”

He leaned forward and breathed fire through the dragon mouth.

A thin blue, almost invisible stream shot out. Unlike his normal breath attack, it barely expanded in front of him, flickering in the sunlight. Until it hit the ground. Then the flames broke into a cone that curved up into a spiked wall in front of Niva, almost like a clawed hand reaching up from the ground. It wasn’t as wide as before, but it traveled further and carried enough force to kick up the dirt.

Ryan broke off sooner this time, catching his breath, and grinned at Lisa.

“That was certainly more intense than your previous attempt,” her mom said neutrally.

“But why? How does your armor change how the Skill works?”

Ryan shrugged. “Iunno.”

They began to discuss the phenomenon without him.

“It’s pretty common for different Skills to interact with each other,” Anne said, “ultimately, they all come from the same source after all.”

“Yes, but I mean how mechanically.”

“Oh, uhh … resonance?”

“More likely, it would be dissonance, no?” Aber said. “The armor eats fire magic but it does not want to eat his fire magic, so it repels it, incidentally adding force.”

Faer signed something and her mom replied, “Good question, we would have to test it. Ryan, could you cast another fire spell for us please?”

“Yes, ma’am?” He manifested a single clawed gauntlet at half strength and shot a [Firebolt]. With the thwump and scream of a bottle rocket, it did shoot away from his hand faster than he was used to, but it wasn’t as pronounced as the difference between breath attacks and …

He dropped the armor entirely and shot another [Firebolt]. That one was also faster.

Yep, he’d guessed it. It was just the natural benefit of leveling up. His spells had become a bit more powerful. Or so he thought.

Lisa’s mom surprised him by saying, “The first firebolt was roughly ten percent more powerful than the second, varying by a few percent depending on the metrics. There is definitively a minor interaction but it’s not enough to explain the full picture.”

“Could be simple physics,” Niva said. “Maybe if we had him blow through a fire-resistant flute we would get the numbers to make up the difference?”

Wow, Ryan hadn’t expected them to dissect it this much, or at all. It was useful to know the armor improved all of his fire spells, but … he didn’t really care.

It was just cool. That was what mattered most to him right now. He could worry about the details when exams came up and he had to be perfect to get good grades and protect his team. Until then, he just wanted to have fun.

“So uh, how does my fire stack up against drakes, ma’am?”

“Apples and oranges.” Niva tossed her arms up in a shrug. “You use mana and Skills, they use sorcerous nature magic; the result shares certain qualities in common but isn’t the same. It’s fascinating how your fire breath can convert mana though.”

“Huh? Oh, that’s not— It doesn’t do that. That’s my [Lesser Fire Affinity]. My Skill isn’t [Fire Breath], it’s [Breath Attack]. I just have to feed it magic. I can do it with pure mana, too.“

Ryan demonstrated and exhaled a blue fan of magic that twisted like fog and flames in the air with flashes of light, rainbow shimmers, and hints of electric sparkles.

It wasn’t as fast or as forceful as his fire breath, and it didn’t produce any heat above his body temperature, but he assumed it could deal damage like a [Mana Bolt] would. To unmade and other forms of magic at the very least.

“Now that is fascinating,” Lisa’s mom said and Niva gestured excitedly at the blue fog that curved around her.

“See? That’s what I mean!”

“Your people’s ability to transmute mental magic into practical effects …” She said it with a weathered sense of wonder like watching the sunrise for the hundredth time. “Other people, us and Northerners, have to lean on other forms of magic to achieve the same thing. A bit of wind and stone magic mixed with mental magic to create a ward, for example. You can just do it.”

Put on the spot like this, Ryan had no idea what to say to that.

Anne thankfully brought them back on topic, “That versatility of your breath attack is useful. I wonder if you could use other sources of magic as fuel like monster crystals, items, or people.”

“Or potions,” Lisa added.

Ryan froze, then nodded. “Yeah, I wondered about that myself.”

Could Micah make him something he could drink and then expel in a breath attack? He would have to ask him … he would have to apologize first, or even talk to him again for that matter …

“Could you do it with your helmet for us?” Niva asked. “To compare?”

“Yes, ma’am, but I might be low on mana afterward.”

Three breath attacks and a minute of manifesting his armor, and Ryan had used over half of what he had. He would have to learn to work around that somehow.

He strained to manifest his helmet again until the draconic maw stretched out at his eye level and diverted a portion of his mana into his [Breath Attack].

It shot out as a line again, this one not nearly as pressurized and a lighter shade of blue. And when it hit the ground, it didn’t reach up into a burning claw; it shattered into a shower of sparks like burning steel wool. Or fireworks.

There came a sparkling crash, metal on metal, and each spark echoed the sound of … birdsong.

Startled, Ryan cut off his attack as a phantasmal dawn chorus took to air and fizzled out.

“See!?” Niva pointed out, oblivious to his surprise. “Barely any fire aspects and the attack is still enhanced.”

“It wasn’t as pronounced,” Aber said, “so it seems I was partially right.”

They continued to discuss for a bit before they grew bored of the topic and Niva told him, “Jump next! Try to jump as high as you can!”

“I, uh— High? I’ve only used it to jump far because … I do not want to break my legs?”

The myconid in the corner of his eye signed something. When Ryan turned, Aber translated without prompting, “You are surrounded by six elementalists. We will catch you.”

He glanced at Lisa, who gave him a stiff nod.

Okay then. He shook out his limbs, used [Surge] to wake his body up, and took a few steps back.

Craning his head back, Ryan imagined he was trying to slap the sign of a store or reach a ledge. He hopped, walked forward, picked up speed, bent his knees, and used [Draconic Leap].

A rush of multilayered power flooded into his legs and vanished like a magic trick. Over a dozen kinds of magic disappeared into a hat and Ryan pulled a leap out that catapulted him past the walkways, past the windows, the rain gutters, the roof shingles, and the dark woman who sat on a blanket there surrounded by a swarm of insects.

His momentum ran out and suddenly, Ryan hung in the air a meter over the roof of Garen’s house. He peered over a sea of brown rooftops, chimneys, and lush terraces. A sea of brown dotted with vibrant colors.

He dreamed of flying again, as he had so often this summer. A sea of green beneath him and a sea of blue above. The wind in his hair and his smile. He smiled breathlessly while his stomach dropped.

And then he fell.

“Uh. Uhh. Help.”

The dark woman watched with a stoic expression. Rather than catch him, she waved a hand and half of her insect swarm vanished in a flash of distorted white light.

Ryan looked down and the vertigo hit him. Everyone in the courtyard had shrunk down to a third of their size. The gutters and roof shingles blurred past him again, then the railing of the walkway.

“Help? Guys? Guys!?”

He was certain he was about to splinter apart like a wooden crate in the dirt when the breeze caught him like a trampoline. It buoyed him upright and gently set him down on the blessed dirt.

“A little over seven meters,” Lisa’s mom said, “and it seems you took to my daughter’s lessons after all.”

“Huh?”

“Your Skill. It infuses a variety of essences into the formula, or patterns, of your legs.”

Ohh, so that was how that worked.

Of his three new Skills, Ryan had understood [Draconic Leap] the least. He’d thought maybe he had gotten it because of the kinetic spells he had been learning, like [Longstrider], that maybe his level up had completed something for him.

But the Skill didn’t feel like any spell he knew. It cycled mana through his legs and rather than use any of it as fuel, a small portion of the mana just … vanished.

Part of him had hoped the Skill was so powerful it consumed mana quicker than his senses could track. But no, it just turned his legs into potions.

“Can— can I go again?” Ryan asked. “I think I can jump higher than that and I want to say hi to whoever is on the roof.”

“Purjana!” Niva hollered suddenly. “Come down here and say hit to Lisa’s friends!”

A woman’s head with long, black hair peeked over the edge of the roof and peered at them. She seemed to consider, then said, “No. I’m weird,” and dipped again.

“Ugh. Hold on, I’ll go talk to her, Lisa.” Niva gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder in passing. She took a step forward and, like climbing a single step of a staircase, simply stepped up onto the roof. The wind carried her up, obviously, but it was so unnaturally graceful it looked like her one step had been stretched across seven meters.

Ryan gaped.

Barely throw a fireball, my ass.

“If you and your friends want to become stronger, Lisa, this is a good place to start. You can help Ryan hone his new abilities to the fullest … when he recovers. In the meantime, he can help you with your project. If you do not mind?”

“Of course not, ma’am,” he replied automatically and wondered, Help? “Do you want to try that now?”

“I borrowed the books on meditation already. If you don’t mind?”

“No, sure. Let’s do it!” Ryan was kind of excited. Lisa rarely needed his help with anything. If he thought about it like that, who cared about the pressure?

“Oh,” her mom said before they left, “one more thing. Purchase two items enchanted with feather fall. Then you can leap around as much as you like.”

The trick to extending a self-centered Path to others for [Teachers], two of the books Lisa had borrowed from the library agreed, was a three-stage process.

The first stage required you to learn how to meditate while conscious, something many people learned to do instinctively in minor ways—to manipulate Skills, review information, or internalize new experiences as a learning aid.

The books divided this first stage into four steps. The first part was learning to remain partially aware of your surroundings while meditating by focusing on a single sense. Hearing was the recommended sense, using a quiet room and a metronome or clock, but touch using a trinket you kept in your hands, or smell using a scented candle, were also good options.

Taste was not recommended because of the risk of choking on food, and sight could be overwhelming for beginners.

The second step was to expand your awareness to all of your senses.

The third step was to learn how to meditate quickly or partially while going about your normal day or work.

The fourth step was optional and only recommended to experts and people with certain Skills, and it required you to learn to meditate fully and go about your regular day at the same time as if you had a multi-tasking Skill.

Once you had the third step of the first stage down, you could move on to the second stage.

The second stage didn’t matter. Nor did the third one, because Ryan already had the first stage down and that was all he needed. He had learned to meditate in quick bursts so he could cut people out of his [Pack Aura]—’people’ being Kyle—and he had learned to meditate partially because he didn’t trust his roommates—’roommates’ being Kyle. Because fuck Kyle.

It took him twenty minutes to shake the rust off and then he could meditate, loosely, with his eyes open … and if he sat still and there wasn’t anything around to distract him.

”Sorry, Lisa.”

“No, that’s good,” she said as she gathered up the books she had borrowed for him. “I thought this would take much longer or I would have told the others to start planning ahead. Wait here. I’ll go get my mom so we can try this out.”

She left him sitting there alone on the floor of an unfamiliar room … with fourteen Draconic Salamanders bundled up into spheres in the center of a giant warding circle. Her muffled footfalls grew distant until they cut off entirely past a certain point. A sound ward, he assumed.

The silence grew eerie.

Ryan reached over, pulled Sam onto his lap, and scritched his neck.

She returned with two other people in tow. “My mom is busy, but Aber agreed to help us, and look who I found!”

The dark-haired woman stepped into the room, and Ryan set Sam down to stand up and meet her.

“Ryan, this is my aunt Purjana. Purjana, this is Ryan. He is the friend with the [Drake] Class I mentioned.”

“Do you have other friends named Ryan?”

“No?”

“I would not have presumed.”

He held a hand out. “Hi, it is a pleasure to meet you, ma’am … again. I’m sorry if I disturbed your peace up on the roof.”

She stared at him and did not shake his hand.

“Uh, are you a summoner like Lisa, too?”

“Not like Lisa, no.”

“Oh, I thought— Lisa told me everyone in her family taught her the basics of different forms of magic.” He gestured at her as an excuse to lower his hand. “Were you her summoning instructor?”

“I taught her biomancy when she was young, but Lisa did not show an interest in summoning until she returned home from here. She did not ask me for help on her project when she did.”

“I saw your annotations in the notes!” Lisa said with forced cheer. “They really—”

“You did not ask for my help,” the woman cut her off.

Lisa shut up.

Ryan smiled awkwardly, a guest in the middle of a family scene that he had no context for. He glanced at Aber, but the man watched Lisa as if he expected her to handle this on her own.

She didn’t, thankfully. “Uhm, Purjana wanted to sit in while you work, if that’s alright?”

“I want to watch you,” she said and stared directly into his eyes, “while you repair these constructs. I will learn to emulate your magic myself and then we will have no more need of you.”

Ryan nodded nervously. “Okay.”

Aber freed one of the Draconic Salamanders for him but kept it locked in a paralysis effect at his request so Ryan could hold it and move it around, if necessary.

With an audience watching, it took him longer to reach the right headspace, but his experience beat his nerves. The world around him dimmed. The people in the corners of his eyes vanished into shadows. The wooden floor became opaque, revealing a sea of stars beneath him. And the Draconic Salamander looked so vibrant in comparison.

He picked it up to inspect it. It had only been a week, but he could see the places where the Salamander was beginning to fall apart. Its colors blurred, details disappeared, lines unraveled, and features bled into one another.

He thought back to those hours he had fought and chased them through a city underground—had he met this one before?—and he pictured it the way it should have been.

It was … surprisingly intuitive to him how he should go about fixing it. Ridiculously intuitive. He began by getting a feeling for the Draconic Salamander and tracing a barebones version of it within his mind. Not a true painting. If his Teacup Salamanders and bird-singing tree were like moving statues, then this was a sketch on thin, see-through paper folded into an origami shape of the Draconic Salamander.

Once he had that down, he found the most dilapidated spots of the Draconic Salamander in his hands and painted the corrections in far more detail in the matching part of his sketch.

The final step was to simply align the two and press motes of potential, conceptual essence, through his sketch like light through a colored glass.

In his hands, the paralyzed Teacup Salamander began to—

Huh?

Draconic, not Teacup. Why had he thought—

A heavy hand gripped his shoulder and a man with dark skin and pink and gold eyes leaned into his field of vision. In a low voice, he ordered him, “Stop.”

Ryan snapped awake and saw what he had done. He had fixed the Draconic Salamander’s scales, in part. A patch of them was more defined. But where they bordered the creature’s wings, a sliver of the connective tissue had been cut. One of its wings truly did look grafted onto its body now, and the scales of its body and skin of its wings both flickered in and out of existence at the same time, trading places and then appearing both at the same time. They overlapped in a way that made his brain hurt to look at.

The Draconic Salamander couldn’t move, but it glared at him with a wounded look in its eye.

“I didn’t mean to— I can fix it!”

“No,” Aber told him, “you can’t. Not yet.”

He stole the Draconic Salamander from his hands and curled it back up into a sphere again.

“What happened?” Lisa asked. “What went wrong?”

“I thought I was healing it,” Ryan insisted. “It felt right?”

“Heed me while I demonstrate your actions in comparison,” Purjana said. She placed a hand on her chest. “My name is Ryan and I require a pen. I believe there is a pen in that bag.” She pointed at Lisa’s bag near the door.

Lisa lunged for it but seated on the floor where she was, she was too slow. “No!”

Purjana picked her bag up, upended it, and violently shook it, causing her books, notebooks, pens, pouches, and a shower of lint to spill onto the ground. They bounced off the wood, and Sam fled behind Lisa from the hail of projectiles.

Her aunt crouched down and delicately plucked a pen from the mess.

“I have found a pen. Huh? What is all of this? Oh noo!” She pressed the back of her hand against her forehead as if she were about to swoon. “Where could the rest of these stationary supplies possibly have come from? What a travesty!”

Ryan set his jaw. Lisa was weird and sometimes condescending. Of course, her family would also be weird and condescending. He could deal with this.

“Are you saying I lack finesse?”

“Among many other faculties, yes.”

“‘Finesse’ may not be the right word when you are working with such trace amounts of magic,” Aber said as he resealed the ward and joined them. “The bigger issue is that your spirit is, frankly, a mess.”

He gestured at the mess on the floor.

Sam was retrieving pens for Lisa and shooting glares at her aunt.

“You did patch it up a bit. You infused it with something that might have been close to ‘Draconic Salamander’ essence if I had to guess, but that isn’t all you did. You also infused it with traces of a similar essence type and what I’m pretty sure was bird essence.”

“My Skills,” he realized. “I should have known. I knew they bleed into my mana. My mana breath should have been a reminder of that.” He ran a hand through his hair and stifled a groan as he shot a look at where the wounded Salamander now lay in a bubble.

“It’s impressive that you learned to do this so quickly,” Aber said, “but if you want to help Lisa, you need to clean up your spirit first. Isolate those Skills of yours somehow. Not completely, mind you. A healthy spirit must remain interconnected the same way your body is. Just … tidy it up a bit so when you reach for a pen in your bag, a dozen other items don’t come spilling out by accident.”

“Okay.” Ryan nodded seriously. “How do I do that, sir?”

Aber shrugged. “I have no clue. I’ve never had to help someone through an issue like this.”

“In magic theory, we learned about how some people need to practice to keep different affinities separate,” Lisa said, “since the bleeding gave you a fire affinity, that could be a place to start? I’m sure the Registry will have something on the subject.”

“In the meantime, we will continue to preserve them as much we as we can, so try to learn how to heal them—not change them, just heal them—by the end of the month, okay?”

Ryan nodded and hesitated, “Uh, sir. Do you have to keep them locked up like this to preserve them?”

“We do it to prevent them from expending energy, why?”

“Oh, it’s just … it feels wrong to see them like this. If they are anything like my paintings, they should be moving around, behaving like drakes. They’re animated concepts, right? You can’t represent a concept with a still image. They need …” he struggled to find the right word.

What was the word for ‘perspective’ as an aspect of the subject, not the eye of the beholder?

“Different sides? Angles? Uh, context? I don’t know. It’s stupid.”

Aber shared a look with Lisa and shrugged. “No, it’s not stupid. We can absolutely try that out. Do you have any other suggestions?”

Surprised, Ryan looked up. “One or two? Like, what if you kept them under observation like Micah does?”

“He means empowering them through perception,” Lisa translated.

Aber hummed as he sat down with them. “That would be tricker. The power of observation is almost always partial and biased. It would corrupt them. We would have to engineer a complex divination spell …”

“Or use mirrors?” Ryan suggested. “Maybe if you covered an entire room with mirrors and had them observe themselves?”

“Ha! I do not wish to see how they would mutate themselves over time, no. Although maybe some of my siblings would.”

His first attempt at repairing the Draconic Salamanders had taken longer than Ryan had thought, almost half an hour, and he stayed over for a few hours more before he made up his mind to leave.

“If you want an excuse to get out of here,” he told Lisa, “I could tell them we have homework to do together, but I forgot it back at school. You could make fun of me while I try and fail to learn the guitar.”

“I still can’t believe you bought that thing.”

“What’s the point in owning a Manual of Instruments but no instruments?”

She smiled, but it quickly faded and she shot him a perturbed look. “I don’t tell you you’re stupid that often, do I?”

“Uh, you do it sometimes …?”

She shook her head. “I can’t play any instruments at all. I shoudn’t call anyone stupid for trying to learn one themself.”

He considered reassuring her that it was fine, but this seemed important to her, so instead he said, “We could take turns with the Manual and guitar? Or you could listen while you build your hot air balloon.”

“That does sound nice …”

“But?”

“But we’ll be visiting the Heswarens tomorrow, and my family wanted me to share what I know about them before we go, so … raincheck?”

“Sure. Meet up Sunday afternoon to search the library? If we don’t find anything, we can ask some of the teachers for advice on Monday.”

“That works.”

Ryan ducked into the living room and asked Anne when she wanted to leave.

She told him, “Ready to go when you are,” so he thanked Lisa’s family for their hospitality and advice, and they said not to be a stranger.

“You look happy,” she told them as they headed down the street.

“That was fun,” he admitted. “Mostly. What did you do while we were gone?”

“I learned a few more words in sign language and we talked about world affairs, but that was also fun.”

They caught each other up on what they had been doing, and it was mostly friendly chatter between them. It felt weird to walk home with just Anne. They parted ways halfway to the school, and Ryan took a detour to browse the Bazaar for featherfall enchantments and set items.