The town silently let us go.

The first rays of the sun peeking between two far away mountain peaks shine on the odd patterns of the pendant Pheyis gifted me. It looks vaguely reminiscent of the printed patterns of a computer circuit, engraved lines with sharp turns and obscure purposes. Makes me wonder if something would happen if I pushed mana through in the right way. I remember Pheyis used a token to light a fire back on the first day I met her. I softly rub the pendant in between my fingers. The material’s texture is pleasant, and the engraved grooves, somehow still sharp regardless of however old the thing truly is, make it oddly satisfying to rub.

She only said this should bring me good luck, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to have an actual secret function.

We need to learn more about magical items.

We’re barely past the gate and Alix is already cheerfully talking.

“Okay Marc, you were the boss in town since you kinda understand their language and you knew the people, but out here, I’m the leader.” He flashes me a winning smile. “And the leader says, always be paranoid!”

He’s already playing with one of those creepy black holes of his, using it like a cap to project some shade on his face.

“Right, creatures hunting you at all times. Didn’t you say you kicked their asses though? You stayed out here for over twenty days.”

A flicker of… something passes in his eyes at my words, his smile frozen for half a second. Was that… anguish? Yet his voice is steady as he answers me.

“Indeed, cause whenever I was wondering if I was being too paranoid, it turned out I should be even more!”

I deftly make my way on a slope of loose rocks, noting with some pride that Alix isn’t navigating it nearly as easily while I answer.

“You can just flash burn things away right? I saw the result on the whale you killed, pretty impressive. How does your magic even work by the way?”

“Eh, trade secret! Can’t be telling you my weaknesses.”

He doesn’t know.

“You don’t know, do you?” I flatly state.

He answers with indignation.

“Of course I do!”

I can’t help but snicker, I’m perfectly certain he doesn’t. It’s like he’s tried to bullshit me a hundred times and I just know he is doing just that right now.

Uh.

“Hey Alix, can you tell?”

He’s still focused on his footing and doesn’t catch the sudden seriousness in my tone.

“What?”

“I… I know.” He does look up at that, puzzled. Well there’s my answer. “Never mind. We should figure out how you manipulate mana like that, perhaps I can learn to do something similar.”

He sighs in defeat.

“I have a trait called greater light manipulation, it’s a system boon that lets me do things without thinking about them.” A short pause. “When I try to analyze what’s going on it becomes much harder to understand.”

“Look.” He says moving his little patch of pure black in front of his hand. “It’s like flexing a muscle, I can push more or less just like that, and change the shape from a circle to a square if I feel like it.” He casually does so.

He’s moving so much mana, it’s crazy, it’s like it wants to obey him.

“But just like I can’t control a single muscle fiber of my arm, when I try to get fancy, sometimes it works.” The square obediently turns into a star in his hands “And sometimes I spend weeks trying to make a laser beam with no real success.”

The air blurs strangely in front of the star, like heat distortions roughly looking like a tube, then light floods out for a second, then disappears in what looked startlingly like a faulty flashlight.

“See?” He sighs again. “Not even close to a laser.”

“Do you actually know how a laser works?” I ask.

I don’t know that much about lasers myself, but I did dig into the topic once, and we bounce ideas back and forth for hours, as we advance on our way southward. We started with what constitutes a proper light cavity, and ended with various experiments on narrowing the exit opening for the beam.

Some progress was made.

During all that time, an innocent looking patch of darkness hovered by Alix’s shoulder. Slight distortions surrounding that endlessly hungry maw.

- - -

The walk was relatively uneventful, a slow trek towards thesouthern mountains. Nothing like the insane rhythm Pheyis imposed for a couple of days. We stopped at noon and casually dug into our ration packs. Our backpacks are heavy enough that it’s worth taking off a few meals worth of food. We’ll probably start keeping an eye open for game tomorrow afternoon.

Well, Alix will deal with that, he’ll be the one hunting.

We stopped again a few minutes ago to set up the camp for the night. It’s almost luxurious considering that the mats are better than what I was using in my house.

“Oh, wow, good job helping me regenerate mana, three hundred more to play with can go a long way! I didn’t think you’d be able to do much considering we were walking and talking.”

Alix mentioned he was still very low on mana during lunch, so Bob has been on mana gathering duty for him since then. His mana pool goes over a thousand! This damn cheater.

“What do you mean? You’ve been playing with your creepy patches of darkness as we walked too.”

“Yeah, but that’s different, it’s light magic pulling mana from my pool, so I can do it easily. I can’t actually do mana manipulation without stopping to focus.”

Uh. That’s interesting, I was already suspecting that letting Bob cast magic while I handle things on the physical side would be very efficient, but perhaps I still underestimated the value it brings to the table.

“Well, I guess I’m pretty good at multitasking.” A blatant lie, I’m really bad at multitasking.

He raises an eyebrow but doesn’t comment further so I turn around to look over the landscape.

The purples and greens of the sunset give a strange vibe to the distant mountaintops, it’s somewhat gloomy. We lost sight of Wathamber a while ago, when we crossed the first crest between valleys. This one is a bit higher up than the one holding the gilfeith town, hosting a thinner forest and showing more rocky cliffs.

First stop on the long road to the south and Gorlinguia, the country of the seafolk.

I wonder if we’ll make it. We still have over eleven months to live through before perhaps having a chance to get out of the Study and find a way to get some reparations from the Knowledgeable. Preferably on my terms.

Speaking of which, I’ve been slacking since Alix arrived.

I unsheathe my sword with an hard expression and start practicing.