Though he’d cleared up the table of contents, Elach hadn’t unblurred the descriptions of the incantations. So now he had the solution right in front of him, but he couldn’t read it. He tried the white ink before anything else, not expecting anything and getting exactly what he expected. Maybe if he found something naturally blurry he could put the text up to it, and that would cause another reaction like the white ink and transform the blurry stuff into something he could use to un-blur the text?

That would have been Elach’s next plan of attack, if there’d been anything blurry in the room to begin with. As he pressed the book face down onto the lectern to see if that did anything Elach heard a splash from behind him, and he spun around to catch the tail end of something diving into the ink. It looked like the tail of a giant fish combined with the nib of a fountain pen, and that scared the tar out of Elach. That thing was either the fail condition or how he was supposed to clear the blurred words. Or both. Maybe the creature had some kind of membranes covering its eyes that let it see through the ink, and those would let him see the words on the page. Or it could secrete an oil that he could rub over the page to make it legible. Issi beasts were a vast and bizarre lot, and their materials were valuable for a reason.

The ink burbled below the white spot, and Elach backed as far away from it as he could. He’d been attacked by enough Issi beasts to know where this was going. A fish-like Issi beast breached and scattered the white ink, it’s silver hide leaking ink through it’s gills and from a ridge of fins lining it’s back that were hollowed out like fountain pen tips. The pen-fish curled its body into a crescent as it hit the apex of it’s leap, it’s metal plates vanishing under each other like a folding telescope instead of crinkling like flesh. This beast was heavily armored, and from the way it’s fins, tail, and teeth glinted, razor sharp. It’s black pool of ink restrained by a glass-like dome of an eye locked a single dot of white ink on Elach before it tumbled back into the ink with a mighty splash, smashing a small portion of the dais away where it crashed into it.

“Not fighting that.” Elach decided. “Tough hide is annoying enough, but this is ridiculous.”

The ink had already mostly filled in the gash the beast made in the dais, but a glint in the rubble caught Elach’s attention. He leaned over the dais, his head on a swivel just in case the pen-fish came back, and brushed away the ink as well as he could to reveal that the rock was more of a coating than a solid material. Underneath there was a layer of gleaming steel, darker than the pen-fish’s plating and obviously harder, since there wasn’t even a single scratch on the steel compared to the ruined rock around it. And in the rubble Elach pulled out a single silver sliver, a piece of the pen-fish’s plating that had been knocked off by the steel underneath. He doubted that was what he needed, but it wouldn’t hurt to try.

The sliver slid along the page like it was greased, and for a moment Elach held onto the hope that he’d found the answer. But after a minute passed and the letters were still blurred, Elach turned his attention back towards the pen-fish that was randomly surfacing around the dais. It was being way too conspicuous not to be part of the solution, so Elach just had to find out what that was. The creature had been attracted to the white ink in the first place, so maybe he had to lure it somewhere to get it to do… something. Elach held the table of contents above the ink, hoping that he hadn’t screwed himself over by clearing out all of the ink, and breathed a sigh of relief as the ink below started glowing white. These wheels were still turning.

It took a few minutes for the pen-fish to breach through the new ink spot, even though Elach had seen it swim by multiple times before. It must be on a timer, so someone who hesitated the first time around wasn’t working with seconds between the puddle forming and the pen-fish attacking.

“Pen-fish.” Elach muttered to himself, the words grating over his tongue. “You can come up with something better than that, Elach. Maybe fountainhead? Silvergar? Inkskipper? Yeah, inkskipper sounds way better. Let’s go with that.”

The inkskipper bashed it’s fin against the dais again as it fell, sloughing off more rock to expose the steel underneath. The ink had already risen to just barely be under the lip of the fifth step up the dais, leaving Elach with a smaller and smaller area to work with. This time the inkskipper didn’t shed any silver, but when it did a few victory jumps Elach noted that it’s tail had been caved in on one side. The steel was far stronger than the fish’s silver plating, and Elach turned to the thick pillar of the stone lectern. It was built seamlessly into the ground so he wouldn’t be able to move it, but maybe it wasn’t working because of the thick layer of stone separating the steel from the book. Or maybe it was just stone, and he’d end up eliminating himself for trying this.

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Elach sighed, kneeling down to inspect the base where the lectern connected to the dais. It was as seamless up close as it had been from a distance, and when Elach tried to scratch at it with the sliver of silver it scraped away like wet clay. There wasn’t the resistance he would have expected from rock, but he knew from a few hard falls that it was definitely solid. Maybe it was some kind of rock-paper-scissors thing, rock covers steel breaks silver scrapes away rock. That would certainly be a trial-like thing to include. Elach scratched off a surprisingly thin layer of rock to reveal a thick steel pillar beneath, standing up quickly and smacking the back of his head on the rectangle of stone above.

Lights flickered on and off in Elach’s vision as he groaned in pain, rolling over to look at the underside of the lectern. It still looked the same, but there was still that seam connecting the head to the body of the lectern. He’d dismissed that earlier as nothing, but now that everything else seemed to be connected to a mass of steel below it drew his attention. When the room stopped spinning enough for him to sit up, Elach worked the sliver into the seam and worked away at it until the rectangular head of the lectern separated with a wet pop and crashed to the ground, narrowly missing Elach’s foot by a few millimeters.

“Hoo.” Elach exhaled, his heart pounding from the near miss. “That worked way too well.”

The stone slab that fell from the lectern had cracked right down the middle, revealing gleaming steel underneath with bone white lines shooting through it. He was right. The stone was blocking the lectern from powering the book. And from the way the white lines pulsed, it seemed like it didn’t need to be connected to the pillar to work. He painstakingly scraped the rock off of the slab until one face was completely revealed, then sat cross-legged with the rock resting on his legs and placed the book on the steel slab. And nothing happened. No rush of Issi, no text unblurring, no chime of success ringing out from nowhere. As long as the text was blurred, he had no way of knowing if he’d just done what he was supposed to or utterly screwed himself over. He flipped the slab over and scraped off the rest of the rock, finding that the slab was mirrored on both sides. It didn’t look like it had to connect to anything to work, and Elach let out a breath he’d been holding for a good minute now; he was still missing something.

Elach set the slab down on the ground and stood on slightly wobbly legs, the world spinning around him as he lurched towards the stone pillar for support. He pressed his hand down on the now circular top of the podium and felt something dig into his palm, sharp but not sharp enough to do more than make him grunt in pain and put less pressure on his palm. Elach moved his palm off the center of the pillar to see a wickedly sharp point dotted with blood. His blood, he realized as he looked at his palm, a small cut in his hand that had barely hurt at all. Which meant that this was absurdly sharp; any jagged edges would have ripped at his skin and hurt way more. It was like the tip of a steel spear was buried in a landslide. Or a harpoon.

Elach started shaking in anticipation as he poked around at the couple centimeters of harpoon that was visible through the stone, wiping more and more stone away with the sliver until it was obvious that unearthing the harpoon was a fool’s errand. Elach set the sliver down on the top of the column and shook his cramping hands out, watching the inkskipper break the surface every now and again in it’s endless loop around the dais. It seemed to grow closer with each and every lazy go around, and when it swam so close to the edge of the dais that Elach could hear it’s silver fin scraping rock off of steel as it went by. But that should have been impossible. The fish was at least three feet thick minus the fin, and the steps up the dais were a foot tall at best. Had the steps that vanished under the ink disappeared completely?

No. He’d stood in ankle-deep ink on the lowest step of the dais. And there was a very simple way to test this hypothesis. Elach waited for the inkskipper to surface on the other side of the dais and reached a hand down into the ink, grasping for anything solid for a few heart-stopping moments until his fingers brushed against solid stone. The dais was still there. And the inkskipper had somehow swam right through it. Maybe the stone and steel became malleable under the ink?

Elach yanked his hand back and waited for the inkskipper to make another round, then lowered himself into the ink. It came up to just above the middle of his calves as he waded along the dais, rubbing his feet along the bottom where the fish had passed through to try and find anything out of place. Not once did he so much as stumble in a crack, so Elach hopped back up onto the dais above the ink and gathered his thoughts. A smile slit his face from cheek to cheek as the beginnings of a plan wormed their way into his mind, and Elach bent over to cup some of the ink in his hands.

“Let’s see how little ink you can swim in!” Elach called out to the circling inkskipper as he dripped a line of ink across the lowest step of the dais. The ink stuck to the vertical steps like it was a far more viscous and sticky liquid, which gave Elach hope that he was on the right path. When he’d made a perfect line from one side to the other, Elach shone the index down onto a portion in the middle of the dais to turn it white. And then he retreated to the top of the dais to wait for the inkskipper’s response.

It came far faster than he was expecting.

No more than ten seconds after the ink turned white Elach heard something cutting through the ink at a breakneck speed. He barely had time to turn around and see the inkskipper slam it’s fin into the dais, sloughing away stone and ink to reveal the steel underneath. A bellow of rage sounded from it before it dove under the ink once more, then moments later rammed the other side. This time it’s fin shot up onto the dais, and it disappeared right before it touched the white spot. Elach braced himself for the breach, and the inkskipper shot it’s entire body out through the thin line of ink to devour the white spot. Elach had a moment to wonder how the thing was going to get back in when it slammed down onto the dais, flopping around for a few terrifying moments until it managed to maneuver itself back into the ink.

“So it can come through any amount of ink, but it can’t get back into any amount of ink. Weird.” Elach said as he walked down to see the steel the inkskipper had revealed.

The steel wasn’t marked like the slab was, and the inkskipper unfortunately didn't shed any more silver that Elach could have used to scrape away the stone. Elach shot a glance at the pillar, and all the pieces fell into place.

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Elach led the trail of ink up onto the layer of the dais that wasn’t quite submerged yet and let it pool in the middle of one of the steps. Then he connected that step to the one above it, and it to the one above it, until the ink was fully connected all the way up to a large puddle around the lectern. The top he’d popped off to a wicked harpoon-like point gleamed wickedly just above the pool of ink, and Elach took in a shaky breath as he went over his plan for the last time. The inkskipper could swim in any amount of ink, as long as it was thick enough to stick it’s fin out of, it’s body collapsing into apparently nothing while it was in the ink. And it was attracted to the white ink, like a predator to bleeding prey. So when Elach turned the small pool of ink at the top of the dais white, the inkskipper would smell blood and come rushing up to attack it. Then, if he was lucky, the fish would fall and impale itself on the lectern turned harpoon and he could just wait for it to die and use it’s glass eyes to un-blur the words. But if it didn’t, Elach would erase the inkskipper’s line back to the rest of the ink and trap it on the dais until he could come up with another way to kill the thing. Or talk to it, if it was sentient like Hollow or Gilt. But it was more likely this thing was some kind of Issi manifestation Resthollow had called up specifically for this test, and would only have one or two functions built into it.

Elach did one last survey of the room to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, and with confidence that he hadn’t Elach turned the index to the base of the lectern and averted his gaze. Then he strolled down the edge of the ink where his trail started, ready to erase the connection the moment the inkskipper smelled blood. It took only seconds this time as well, and as the pen nib-like fin zipped past him and towards the lectern Elach kicked away a foot of the ink and turned to the lectern with anticipation buzzing in the front of his mind.

With a grand crash the inkskipper burst through the white spot, snapping it’s jaws closed mid air and causing a spray of white ink that it hadn’t done before. Then, with all the theatrics of a performer stabbing themselves through the gut with a fake knife the inkskipper twisted in mid-air to perfectly impale itself on the harpoon. Thanks to it’s silver plates scrubbing the stone away the inkskipper sank straight down to the bottom of the harpoon, ink spurting out of the wound like a broken fountain as it struggled to break free, slowing to barely a trickle after a few long moments as the beast twitched a few times before falling still. Elach waited another few minutes before walking up to the inkskipper’s corpse, putting a hand on the creature’s carapace to try and feel for any kind of movement before he tried pulling the thing’s eyes out. Feeling nothing, Elach walked up to the head and tapped on it’s eye.

Elach jumped back in surprise as the inkskipper’s eye tumbled to the ground, a perfectly spherical orb filled with black ink and a small sphere of white ink in the center. Elach studied the orb for a few moments before pulling the book out of his pants, where he’d kept it snug to his body with his belt along with the slab. He opened it to page 42 and ran the eye along the blurred words, and nothing happened. He hadn’t expected that to work, but it was worth a try. He couldn’t go back from draining the ink out of the eye, so trying the easy thing out first seemed like the right choice. Elach placed the slab and the book down on the ground and tore one of his sleeves off at the seam, wrapping up the glass eye so that if it shattered he wouldn’t get cut up too bad. He straddled the inkskipper’s tail and hovered the glass eye over the point of the harpoon sticking up through the creature, then gently pressed it down until he heard a very organic pop and ink soaked through the rag. He drained the eye of all it’s ink until all that rattled around inside of it was a small white marble, holding it up to the ceiling full of light and smiling to himself. He could see the symbols carved into the steel ceiling that were emitting light through the eye.

This would work.

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Sechen watched as the brat from house Hoalt stumbled out of the elevator with far more dings and bumps than the first test should have given him, cursing like only a highborn could; all style, no substance. The words themselves were the weapons; servant, lowborn, nobody, and more that could only insult someone if they cared about those exact things. A soldier would tell a story in their cursing, but a highborn? Sechen had yet to meet one who had any creativity in the field. But pissed off people were likely to vent, so Sechen dipped out of her current conversation with the door guard and walked towards the Hoalt brat with a loud snap.

“What happened up there?” Sechen asked the Hoalt kid, completely ignoring the guard escorting him to the door marked with a red slash. That served double duty in annoying the guard and getting the kid to puff his chest up at his importance of being addressed.

“I was unjustly attacked and removed from the trials by my so-called ‘partner’. He waited for me to leave the elevator and sucker punched me in the back of the skull, the coward. Probably couldn’t stand being in a room with his betters. Wisp herders should stay out of the business of practitioners like us anyways.” The kid said, but his eyes were already glazing over. Dealing with bondless was always tricky; he probably only had one or two more answers in him before she had to deal with the guard instead.

What the kid had called his partner intrigued her. But was it enough to waste one of her last questions on? Her curiosity ended up winning over her investigative mind. “What do you mean ‘wisp herder’?”

“That guy escorts people like me to the primal spring to get our wisps. At least he used to.” The kid scoffed. “Seems like he couldn’t even do that right.”

Sechen frowned. The escorts were some of, if not the most powerful Issi-less people out there; they had to fight off Issi beast attacks, protect kids who were bonding with their wisps, and do that multiple times over the few weeks of the wisp festival. The mortality rates were absurd, and the benefits were nowhere near equal to the risk they put themselves in. Pyreheld and Freshetfall had dozens of escorts on call at any time, and only about half of them survived to claim their own percieved-powerful wisps on the following solstice. There was no way any of them would need to sink to a surprise attack to remove an obstacle like the Hoalt kid.

“What makes you think he’s a wisp herder?” Sechen asked.

The kid rolled his eyes. “Because his friend led me to my wisp. The two of them have been wisp herders for six years at this point.”

“Six years?” Sechen scoffed. “Nobody guides for that long. And there are only two of them? That makes no sense.”

“When the rest of the village and all of the visitors won’t so much as volunteer to take their place they do.” The kid said smugly, like keeping them enslaved for so long was some kind of victory. “And they’re not wisp herders for somewhere prestigious like Pyreheld or Freshetfall. No, they’re responsible for a primal spring that sprung up near some nameless and pointless village a day’s travel from here.”

Then wouldn’t having a wisp from that village make you lesser? Sechen thought, but the kid wouldn’t have heard it even if she said it out loud; his eyes were completely glazed over at this point. The second she walked away reality would snap back and fill the newly made holes in his mind with something else. But the guard was still relatively lucid, so Sechen turned her attention to them.

“So what actually happened up there?”

The guard shot the Hoalt kid a disdainful look, then focused on Sechen. “This kid instigated a fight he shouldn’t have and got his teeth kicked in. It wasn’t even close; you should have seen the state he was in before the healing kicked in.” The guard chuckled darkly, and Sechen held back a grimace. “The other guy’s trying his heart out to pass the first part of the trial right now, and it’s technically possible, but this kid here,” the guard smacked the kid upside the head with all of his strength, leaving behind a bloody streak where his armor ground against skin, “made it so he has to suffer through the practitioner version of the test instead of the bondless version. Should have the little prick written up for murder.”

If Sechen was just a little more powerful, she would have said something about the way the guard treated this kid. He might have been a jerk, but this was just an abuse of power. Resthollow was better than most, but comparing a two to a ten isn’t much when the scale goes to one hundred.

“There’s no chance for the other guy, then? No way he could finish the practitioner’s path?” Sechen asked with a little vitriol sneaking into her voice.

The guard either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “There’s a chance he could, since the trials are designed for anybody to complete regardless of what Issi their bond, or bonds, gives them. It isn’t overly difficult, but compared to the bondless trial?” The guard let out a dark chuckle. “The bondless just have to remove some ink and show each other a book. The practitioners have to break off a piece of a manifestation and use it to scrape away enough rock on the upper level to reveal the real incantation.”

Sechen nodded and stored that information away for later. It would help when it was her turn to take Resthollow’s trial. “Can I see what’s happening in that guy’s trial chamber?”

“Nope.” The guard replied, and his next blink showed his eyes starting to glass over. “Take it up with the guy once he’s done. Though you’ll probably need a corpsetalker for that.”

Even if she had a few more minutes of lucidity from this guard, Sechen was done. She walked away without saying anything, and when she was no more than a few meters away the loudest snap she’d heard in quite a while sounded from the infirmary. When she turned to look, the guard and the kid were both gone, swept into their ‘proper’ places as reality dictated they should be.

“Too bad he’s on the wrong side.” Sechen sighed. “Someone who was a guide for that long has got to have an absurd Issi saturation. Revel would have loved to bond with him.”