She woke quietly, exhausted as ever but with a mind clear of the usual fuzz and fog — no doubt the result of Mea’s advice on how to avoid the foods that had been making her sick. Fen’s soft snore and the light of the palemoon creeping into the room through the gaps in the shutter let her know it was still the middle of the night. She just hoped Mea was in her usual place, and willing to talk, because Anise had a lot she wanted to talk about. Slipping out of bed and padding over to the window, she cracked it open for a quick glance to confirm that there was indeed a hulking shadow under the tree in the central courtyard.

The chill air of night blasted her in the face and cut straight through her thin sleepwear before she could latch the shutter again, far colder than it had been the previous weeks. She had always thought that the palemoon was colder than the others, though whether that was just her imagination or not she definitely needed something warmer than her battle robes. She rifled through the closet full of goods that the inn had provided, and wondered yet again at the largesse of the place. Mister Mougein must have been quite successful as a merchant to have ties to the place, let alone be able to afford putting them up there.

Near the back she found a set of robes that seemed exceptionally warm. Better yet, they were designed for dwarves and so would fit even if they ended up being a little loose. They were thoroughly clean and heavy with the smell of perfumes and soaps — proof that the place catered exclusively to nobility. Anyone sensible would just use cleaning magic instead. But, she had to grudgingly admit that soap had its place; she was convinced her battle robes still had lingering traces of the goblin grime no matter how many times she paid to have cleaning Spells cast on them. She had gone shopping with Mea for new ones, but they’d be another week. Weaving protective fibers and plates into them was apparently a difficult task.

She shrugged into the robe that felt thickest and belted it tight, though it was still loose enough on her that she felt compelled to hold it closed manually. Fen was still snoring away when she checked on him, unbothered as ever by her late-night rustling. She whispered a farewell she knew he wouldn’t hear and left the room, heading to the courtyard. No one else was awake, so she had no trouble padding through the inn and slipping out into the night. The shadow didn’t move as she approached, which was unusual. Anise had never managed to actually sneak up on Mea before, and was in truth extremely afraid of doing so. The woman was too dangerous to surprise.

“Mea?” She called while standing out of reach, but there was no reaction. As her eyes adjusted Anise realized that the strange veiled hat Mea had taken to wearing was actually resting on the ground, and the woman had an arm flung over her eyes instead. Anise had never seen the woman actually sleep before, and had begun to assume that she simply didn’t. A little disappointed, she started to head back to her room.

“Need something?” A raspy whisper said from behind. Anise spun about, surprised and pleased and maybe a little sorry that she’d woken her friend. But the moment she saw Mea she froze, a scream bubbled up from deep inside only to be trapped in her throat. Mea’s face was a nightmare — bloodlessly gashed and torn, full of holes and burns that hadn’t even begun to heal. Anise had seen injured people many times before, but nothing like that. She was still staring when the veiled hat dropped into place, breaking her trance.

“Does it hurt?” She asked, after a long silence. She didn’t know what else to say, and went with the first cogent thought she could string together since she had to say something.

“No,” Mea said. Anise wondered if she was just trying to be tough, but then she waved an equally disfigured gloveless hand and continued. “Can’t feel anything at all.”

“Oh.” Anise didn’t know what to say about that either. The town lord had not treated her friend well, not only her face and hands, but her voice sounded as awful as her other injuries looked. Injuries that Mea covered by pulling on her long gloves and readjusting her hat. The silence between them was more than just that, though; Anise hadn’t known them long, but she’d really come to enjoy the company of both the sisters. Now she’d found that they weren’t who she thought they were, and it hurt. It was frightening, too.

While Fen had his own connections to the nobility, it was something they both understood and knew how to deal with. Mostly it just amounted to staying quiet and out of the way. Now she had a personal connection to the royalty of a completely different nation, and just felt at a loss about it all.

“What do I call you?” She asked eventually, not knowing how else to begin. In spite of how warm the borrowed robe had felt at first, the chill of the night was creeping in quickly. Or maybe that was just her nerves. Either way she found herself tightly gripping it closed. “Even if Mia wants to say it’s a little different, her position is close enough to a princess that I at least have an idea of what I’m supposed to do, but I don’t have the vaguest notion how I’m supposed to address you.” She was babbling a bit and knew it, but at least she’d said what she wanted to say without stuttering or mumbling.

“My name,” came the immediate reply.

“But—” A hand large enough to grip her entire head cut Anise off with a wave.

“If,” Mea began, voice strong and confident and hard the way it had been before she had vanished for a week, before the veil and gloves and all the scars. Then she started to cough, the dry sort that didn’t sound like it was helping anything. “If I wanted to be called something else,” she continued far more softly once the fit had ended, with that slightly bubbling rasp Anise just couldn’t get used to. “I would have insisted on it when we met. Same with Mia.” More than the words, more than a noble or royal or whatever Mea was, what Anise heard was a friend. A friend who was just asking to be treated as a friend.

“Mea then.” She said, trying to firm up her feelings on the matter. Mea nodded with a terrible noise that might have been her attempt at humming an affirmation, but all it did was make Anise wince.

“Question for you,” Mea said after a brief silence that wasn’t so awkward anymore. Anise noticed that the distance between them was forcing her friend to strain herself to be heard, and now that she was feeling a bit more at ease about their relationship she started picking her way over the tree’s roots to get a little closer.

“How old are you?” Mea asked. It was such an unexpected question that she lost focus and slipped on the uneven terrain, robe flapping open as she flailed for balance.

“You’re freezing!” Anise hissed, flinching away from the ice cold hand that had caught her. She instantly felt terrible about it, then was angry for feeling that way. “Why are you always so cold!” She raged, trying to calm her shivering.

Even hugging her clothes to herself wasn’t good enough anymore, and she realized she’d have to retreat back inside soon no matter how much she might want to keep talking. Then she felt a tug that brushed along the back of her mind, along the edges of her senses, that tell-tale feeling of magic being used nearby. The hand that had been so cold just a moment ago now radiated heat as Mea effortlessly scooped her up and pulled her close. It was a strangely nice gesture, but it was also embarrassing and undignified and was Mea yet again showing off her absolutely inexplicable mastery of magic and total disregard of personal space.

It all just made Anise angrier.

“Are you showing off? Do you hate me or something?” She shoved her friend a bit until she made room, then nestled into her newly warm side.

“Awful cuddly for an angry person.”

“Shut up! It’s cold out here and you’re warm. How did you do that, anyway?” Then she remembered the awful pain and vertiginous dysphoria she’d felt just from hearing that dwarven girl Ghoumi say the name of a god’s Skill, and all the implications of Mea being born of something powerful enough to own a talent like that. “Nevermind, it’s probably some god thing isn’t it?” No matter how much she wanted to know all the magic there was, what she really wanted was to learn it for herself. Just hearing about things she would never be able to do would only fan the flames of her envy and anger, and she didn’t want to feel that way. Or inflict those feelings on her friend.

“No.”

“No? What do you mean no! There aren’t any Spells that just instantly make someone warm like that!” Magic couldn’t affect someone intrinsically, only extrinsically. It would also take an incredible amount of mana to force an instant change, even if it were possible. Conjuring a little stream of water to fill a cup was easy, trying to remove all the water from inside a Living being all at once was impossible. Everyone knew that.

So the only explanation was some mystical god nonsense.

“Mm?” Mea’s gurgling, grinding version of a questioning hum made her wince again, but she carried on while trying to ignore how awful it sounded.

“It’s one of the fundamental rules of magic! Right up there with the complexity principle, or the law of irreducibility.”

“Never learned those.” Anise groaned loudly and angrily.

“Of course you haven’t! Of course. Well,” she began, trying to dredge up the exact wording her mage teacher had used. The official stuff from the books. “So the complexity principle states that ‘the strength of a Spell is inversely proportional to its complexity’ and the law of irreducibility says that ‘no Spell can operate with only a single type of mana fueling it.’” She wasn’t convinced she’d gotten that completely correct, but it was close enough. “If I’m teaching you the basics, then there’s another— well it’s not a rule exactly. More a warning. You’re not supposed to push too hard on your Spells, or you’ll run out of mana and hurt yourself.”

Her lecture was met with silence.

“That’s the stuff you learn your first day, who taught you anyway?”

“Lleuli,” Mea said, giving her the very last name she was prepared to expect. Her mind simply couldn’t process that for a long beat, then the simmering anger roared to the surface.

“Don’t tell me that! That’s ridiculous. You can’t just say that to me out of nowhere, you know? That’s the best mage in the kingdom you’re talking about! How do you know her? How would you have met her? Why? She’s my idol! You learned from Lleuli, but you don’t even know the basics? That’s just ridiculous! Completely ridiculous.” She huffed a breath before launching back into her tirade. She knew she was being unfair, and she honestly didn’t even know what she was saying anymore. But there was no response at all until the very end when she tiredly flopped against the warmth of her irritating friend’s side.

“Feeling better?” The anger bubbled back to the surface, only to pop into weary laughter.

“Yes, but I’m still mad.”

“Probably fair. I might as well explain, then.” Mea said. That response surprised Anise a little, since Mea tended to be a completely closed book. “Lleuli and Brin came with a team to investigate a new Dungeon on the mountain top, but they weren’t expecting...” Mea trailed off with a vague gesture of the arm that wasn’t occupied with being wrapped around Anise to keep her warm. She’d heard enough to know a few things, so there wasn’t a big need for elaboration, even if she was deeply curious and wanted it anyway.

“There was a lot going on up there,” Mea continued. “Still is. I was, well, no. Our Patron, who is something like a god, had to go help them because they didn’t survive the Invader attack.” Anise took a breath to shriek her disbelief at that, but it stuck in her chest when Mea just rumbled on. “They’re fine, now. Just like all the sirol people, they got resurrected. The two of them wanted to study with the sirol and keep exploring the Dungeon, so they’ll be staying up there for the time being.” There was a dry little cough, then Mea went silent. Anise had questions, of course she did, but she didn’t want to push too hard. She had a feeling Mea would answer in time, so she just relaxed and thought about what she’d heard.

It was unbelievable that the best adventuring team in the kingdom had lost two of its strongest, even to an Invader. They were supposed to be monstrous and powerful, yes, but the Mystic State had kept those demons held off for years beyond counting already. Anise just couldn’t believe that their soldiers were so much stronger than the kingdom’s best that just one Invader could put up that much of a fight. But perhaps the problem came from the fact that Invaders were renowned for coming silently and taking their victims by surprise. Dungeons were static and unchanging, with little to nothing in the way of surprises once they’d been fully scouted, so it made some sense that the Kanna trio may well have just been unprepared for the fight and suffered the consequences.

Consequences that had been overturned by a god-like being — a god-like being that Anise now had a connection to, which gave her a thought. The Kanna trio and their team were the best Dungeon delvers in the kingdom, which made her wonder if she might be able to leverage her connection to Mea in order to meet them and ask for their help. There were other ways to ascend her class, such as defeating another mage who had already ascended, but killing an Arcane Loci in the Cave of Light was the surest one she’d read about. She didn’t want to be stuck at level ninety-nine – and unable to have children – forever, so she had to do it no matter how risky Dungeons were. She trusted Mea and Mia to have her back, but she’d feel a lot better having the Kanna team on her side, too.

“That’s how we met,” Mea continued, soft voice breaking Anise out of her thoughts as she slowly and carefully picked through each word. “Lleuli taught me because she owed a favor. She said I didn’t need the usual lectures; that I was clever enough to figure it out myself.”

“I can’t really argue that,” Anise snorted.

“Do you see every Spell as unique?” Mea asked of a sudden.

“Yes?” She answered, surprised both by the spontaneity of the question, and the question itself. Of course she saw the Spells as unique, because they were. “There are elemental groupings that share characteristics, but each one has its own unique entry in the status and its own command to invoke.” That awful grinding-humming noise made her flinch again, and she considered telling her friend to stop. It might be insensitive to her injuries, but it was simply too painful to listen to.

“I don’t,” Mea responded before Anise could gather herself enough to say what was on her mind. “I only know two elemental Spells — earth and water. I know one for light, the cleaning ones, and one more that I’ll get to soon. [Create Earth],” she said, using the voice commands for once. A surprisingly large lump formed in Mea’s outstretched hand. “[Break Earth],” the lump crumbled into sand. It was a masterful display far beyond Anise’s own abilities, but that was only the beginning. “[Form Earth], [Erase Earth],” she finished by congealing the sand back into a lump, then making it vanish.

“You’re just showing off again,” Anise grumbled, though without rancor.

“Maybe,” Mea said with a small humorless laugh. “The point is that to me that was one Spell.”

“No, that’s obvious nonsense. You clearly just said four different Spells!” She had no idea where her friend was going, but she played along.

“Yes, but it was the same shape.” Anise had to think about that. It was a surprisingly difficult exercise, more befitting a magical scholar than an actual combat mage.

Every Spell had its own feel, its own process for casting, and of course its own command. That’s how she knew them, not by something as esoteric as their shape or the actual names of the mana they needed. Those sorts of things were just distractions in combat, so it took some time for her to work through the steps of [Create Water] and [Disperse Water] in her mind, which she chose because she was more familiar with those than the earth versions. It took a few tries of visualizing the folds and bends and arcs before she realized they really did seem to be similar, if not the same. She tried a few other Spells she knew that might be the same and discovered there really was something to it. But even if that was true, what did it matter?

“I see what you mean, but so what? How does that make it one Spell when you’re still doing them differently?” She said, giving voice to the problem.

“The point is: I’m not. Is a pie not pie if it uses meat instead of spiceberry?” Anise was thrown off by the strange analogy and missed her chance to interject before she was asked another strange question. “How do you characterize the mana types?”

“By their color, I suppose? Why does that matter?”

“Even though you can’t see them?”

“I can see them when they’re in a Spell, or something like a displayed status.” The awful noise of Mea trying to hum a response came again, completely destroying any semblance of a thought process Anise had going. “Please, please stop that. It’s horrible. It sounds like you’re dying, it sounds like I’m dying.” Mea laughed. It was a genuine laugh that seemed to catch the enormous woman by surprise, and eventually devolved into coughing.

“Is that so?” She said when she calmed down. “I’ll try to refrain for your sake, then.” Anise was a little put out at being laughed at, but was glad her friend was willing to listen. “Back to the topic, I think about mana by what it does.” Anise hummed a questioning noise, then realized what she’d done, and what she’d just chastised Mea for doing and flushed. Fortunately, her friend didn’t even seem to notice.

“Increase, decrease, agglomerate, disperse. Fundamentally that’s what the mana types do. If you think about that, and apply that to the Spell shapes, then one shape can do many things.” She really didn’t understand what Mea meant. The mana types did things? She vaguely recalled reading a mention about a theory that unbalanced mana could have environmental effects, which in a way lined up with what Mea said, but that was incredibly esoteric even as a lover of magic. It just wasn’t something she experienced in her life, so it was hard to come to grips with the idea. It was like being told the air was full of different things; it just didn’t mean very much even if she knew that some air was bad some of the time.

“Even if I accept what you’re saying, that still doesn’t explain how you can make yourself warm like this,” she said, patting her friend’s arm where it circled around her.

“Well, I mentioned I knew one more Spell, didn’t I?” She flicked back over the conversation and realized that was true. Mea reached over and laid what must have been a newly created lump of rock down in a patch of dirt away from the roots and Anise herself. “Watch. [Blazing Touch],” she said, then tapped it with a finger. Instantly the spot she’d touched glowed like the heart of a campfire, and threw out heat to match.

Anise hardly processed any of that, because what she had just seen broke most of the rules of magic she knew. To begin with, Mea had used not merely a lump of earth, but actual stone. That was a much higher-level Spell, yet already Anise could see the logic. Mea had pushed harder on the Spell for creating earth, and it had yielded stone. If Anise herself had tried that, it would have resulted in exhaustion and failure. Combined with the way Mea could cast again and again without issue, it must mean that she had a far larger mana pool than normal, which must also be what the higher-level Spells required to function.

But that was far less impressive or interesting than the fact that the Spell she had just demonstrated broke both the complexity principle and the law of irreducibility at once! It was no wonder Mea cared so little for the basics of magic; to her they were nonsense. But one thing above all was clear to her in that moment, and so she asked the question she was burning to ask.

“Would you be willing to teach me?”

“Yes. Not sure how mage training is usually done though, so you’ll have to tell me.”

“I haven’t shown you my ice Spells yet, have I?”

“You’ve cast them in front of me, but not explicitly no.”

“Then why don’t I teach you Ice Lance the traditional way?” The traditional way was a little time consuming, but it was the middle of the night and she was too excited to even think about sleeping. The other problem was that it was embarrassing.

Teacher and student needed to be in intimate contact for a prolonged period while the teacher drew and shaped mana through the student. Eventually the system would recognize this as the student casting the Spell, and the teaching would be complete. Some rare students were able to feel the Spell as it took shape and cast it themselves first, as Anise had been able to do. It had taken only a few days for her to learn each Spell, rather than the weeks or even months that she had heard from others. Rumor also had it that some among the nobility had special books that could teach Spells, but how that worked she hadn’t the vaguest notion.

“How intimate?” Mea asked, once everything had been explained.

“Depends. The mana just has to move through you when I draw it. For me, it was enough to sit on my teacher’s lap, but obviously that won’t work for you and I. We’ll just have to experiment a bit and find out.”

“Does it matter what part of me you draw through?”

“I,” she trailed off, blindsided by the question. It was obvious enough, but she’d never thought about it. Mostly because it was something that just wouldn’t be relevant to most people. “I suppose we’ll have to find that out, too.”

“I don’t mind anything, but why don’t you start by drawing through my arm.” She moved the arm that Anise wasn’t comfortably in the crook of so that it was draped across both Mea’s stomach and her own.

In the end that hadn’t worked, even though Mea claimed she could see the mana moving the way it was supposed to. Mea wanted to try teaching the touch Spells first, before going back to the ice lance, as she claimed the process was simple and Anise had experience learning that way. It hadn’t taken but half a bell before it had clicked in to place, which might have been the result of Mea’s incredible precision, the simplicity of the Spell itself, or Anise’s own cleverness, but had to be a record in any event. The second one took even less time. Learning new magic was exciting enough to be a reward in and of itself, and so she wanted to return the favor.

Unfortunately, it took a great deal of trial and error before they discovered that thing that seemed to work for Mea was exactly as embarrassing as Anise had feared it would be. She was just glad she could keep her face hidden while practically sprawled out on top of her enormous friend’s midsection, because the position was compromising enough without needing to stare into one another’s eyes. It made her feel like a child and, what was worse, they hadn’t been friends so long that the awkwardness could just be washed away. Though even with Fen she would be ashamed to do such a thing.

“Never did answer my question,” Mea said, in a rumbling voice Anise could feel with her whole body. They had been chatting about various things because the process was slow and not very intensive or interactive for either of them. Anise would just slowly form the Spell, but drop it just as it wanted to click into place. Mea meanwhile didn’t have anything to do at all, since they had decided to wait for the system to recognize her as the caster. In case that did anything unique that she would be able to sense.

“Which one?” They’d been talking about a great many things, but nothing popped out as having been forgotten. Or avoided. Some things she preferred not to answer, and so far Mea hadn’t pushed on those.

“Your age. I’m curious.”

“Oh!” She exclaimed when she thought back to nearly the beginning of their conversation. “That’s no secret, I was just surprised when you asked is all. I’m fourteen.” She said with a measure of pride. She’d accomplished a great deal since coming of age only two years prior, which was two years late compared with the all the other kinds, and felt she had every reason to be satisfied with herself about it. She was a higher level even than Fen!

Instead of being impressed and giving a word of appreciation, like she told herself she wasn’t hoping for, or explaining the reason for the question, like she’d been expecting — instead of that, the already still form under her went utterly inert. Mea hadn’t really been moving anyway, but it wasn’t the same. It was the stillness of a rock, or a corpse, and she found it disturbing.

“Hey?” She called, to no response. She called again, then dropped her casting, slid off, and started shaking her friend. Not that she could. Mea wasn’t just still, she seemed utterly unmovable. It was as though Anise were trying to shake a statue awake. She gave that up as futile and began picking her way over the dark-shrouded roots to find out if her friend had just fallen asleep, or what. She didn’t want to even think about any other possibility, but she was quietly starting to get really worried.

“Sorry, where were we?” Mea said, suddenly coming to life again. With a quickly muffled shriek Anise jumped away.

“Everything alright? You seem upset, did something happen?” Mea asked, and at that the fright and worry congealed into a of anger.

“Of course everything’s not alright! You want to know if I’m I upset? Of course I am! It was like you died or something!” She punched her friend’s shoulder, but the only thing that happened was her hand hurt afterwards, which just made it all worse. Like her worry had been completely pointless in the face of Mea’s absurd vitality.

“Ah? Well I’m not exactly alive anyway but never mind that.”

“You can’t just tell me that!” She only barely remembered to keep her voice down, since everyone else was sleeping. “That’s not just something you never mind!” She wanted to punch her friend again for being ridiculous, but managed to contain herself.

“I’m a little surprised you didn’t know, I guess I never said. Well, this body is just a golem. Says it right here, see?” The lightless glow of a status window popped into existence, confirming what Mea said as fact. A host of other strange things floated there in that little pane, like a mana value twice her own, but none of that mattered at that moment so she ignored it.

“Well what just happened, then?”

“Oh, nothing much. Don’t worry about—”

“No. No!” She interrupted. Mea was powerful and scary and some kind of god’s child, but that just wasn’t right, and she wouldn’t stand for it. “You want me to just call you Mea? Treat you like a friend?” The veiled hat tilted slightly. “Then treat me like a friend! You can’t just do that to me. You asked where we were. Why? Did you go somewhere?” There was a brief puff of air that sounded suspiciously like a laugh before Mea responded.

“After a fashion. I had a conversation with my Patron. Normally no one would notice, but we ended up talking about a few other things and I lost track of time. I also lost track of — right!” She had to stop and cough for a moment after getting too energetic. “We were talking about your age, yes? Fourteen really surprised me. I wasn’t expecting you to be so young, you definitely seemed older to me.”

“I do?” She said, trying not to preen. It wasn’t the sort of praise she got very often, and she didn’t quite know how to handle it. “People usually say I’m a little immature,” she admitted.

“A bit led by your emotions, perhaps, but that is as adult a vice as many.” It was a little hard to hear right after being praised, but having her short temper called a vice wasn’t the worst thing that had ever been said about her.

“I suppose that’s fair,” Anise allowed. It still stung, so she changed topics to move on. “Why did you ask, anyway?”

“Ah, well. I noticed that Mia was being very mature for her age, and I wanted a bit of comparison.”

“Aren’t you and Mia the same — wait no. I guess you wouldn’t be? How old is she then?”

“Nine, though I don’t know when she’ll be ten.”

“Nine?! She’s younger than me?” Anise was completely unprepared for that. Mia looked completely matured, which should make her roughly twenty. She wondered if the sirol people aged even more differently than the culai did, but then remembered something. “Wait, is she a golem too?”

“Yes.” She felt a serious headache coming on, and decided she’d had about enough for one night.

“Right,” she took a deep breath. “Right! Well. I think it’s about time I get back to sleep. Thank you for teaching me that Spell of yours, but I was wondering if you might teach me more in the future?”

“Of course. I enjoy spending time with you, Anise, so you’re welcome whenever.” She was glad of the dark to hide her sudden flush. She’d never had many friends, and never any who so openly appreciated having her around, but she didn’t want to be awkward about it.

“Yeah. You too. Heh. Well, goodnight then!” She managed before scampering off. She hadn’t even made it halfway across the courtyard before she was missing her friend’s absurd warmth.