Elach stretched and yawned, forcing Flow to hover in the air for a moment before returning to perch on his shoulder. He tried unsuccessfully to blink the sleep from his eyes, rubbing them one at a time with his right hand so he wouldn’t further disturb Flow.

Last night had been terrible. He’d stayed up for an extra four hours trying to get anything at all to work, messing with both the amber and space-like nectars to try and stimulate his Issi for any kind of reaction. He’d let Flow take the lead, urging them to try whatever they felt was natural for them from before they’d bonded and that he would try to follow along. They’d gotten a little bit closer, Elach’s Issi taking on a slightly thicker empty quality than before, but it had slipped through his fingers for seemingly no reason and they’d been unable to reproduce it afterwards.

Flow had given up after that, but not for a lack of willingness. They’d simply collapsed, dissolving into a cloud of Issi as Elach felt their presence rebuild itself inside of his headspace. He’d taken that as the signal to get what little sleep he could manage.

And after a breakfast of dried fruits and buttered bread that Sentence had left out for him, Elach had made his way to the clearing all on his own. He’d expected to find Sentence waiting for him with some kind of elaborate plan to get his Issi compressed, but he entered a fixed-up clearing with the axe still stuck in the center stone and nothing else. After ten minutes of waiting he’d sensed Flow stirring in his headspace, calling them out for a little company.

And now here he was, thirty minutes past when Sentence had told him to be there, unsure of what to do now. For all he knew, this was a part of Sentence’s training, so he didn’t want to waltz away and screw up whatever was going on. But it was starting to get concerning. Elach leaned against Flow’s stone table and they hopped off of his shoulder, twittering questioningly as they swivel-hopped in place to look around the clearing.

“I don’t know either.” Elach said with a shrug. “Want to keep going where we left off yesterday?”

Flow muttered a series of caws before flapping back to Elach’s shoulder, shutting their eyes. He felt them latch onto his container, a motion he hadn’t known was possible until last night, their consciousness settling in like a blazing hearth next to his own. He pushed on his container and felt the Issi inside of it shy away from his touch for a moment, before sloshing back twice as hard and drowning him in his own power. It was just as jarring as the first time, Flow’s existence settling in next to his own as his Issi washed over them as well.

Flow started off the process by grabbing hold of the Issi around them, bringing ripples to the still Issi like a stone had skipped off of his very existence. He shuddered at the sensation, feeling the ripples spread out across his Issi until his entire container was disturbed. It was like everything had gone numb at once, and the numbness slowly turned back into cool stillness as the ripples returned to nothing.

Flow pecked him on the ear, cawing in annoyance.

“Sorry, sorry. I’ll do it right this time.” Elach apologized. Flow muttered a series of low notes and returned to Elach’s container, skipping across his Issi once more.

Elach grabbed onto one of the ripples and stilled it, frozen in the middle of its movement until he lost control and let it go. He continued on to grasp each ripple on the surface of his Issi sphere, just underneath the insulating layer until the Issi inside of his container was a series of frozen ripples that reached about a quarter of the way down to the middle of his container. This was the point Flow had lost control last time, the ripples dissolving back to nothing as they themselves dissolved into Issi.

This time, Flow still had control. But, like Elach, it seemed that they had no idea where to go from here. He could feel the anticipation rolling off of their consciousness in waves, morphing into confusion and then annoyance as they found themselves still whole and alert. They looked to Elach for help on what to do next, but he was just as clueless as they were. This felt like the closest they’d made it to doing something, but it still didn’t feel like his Issi was compressed at all. Disturbed then stilled, sure, but not compressed.

Tentatively pressing on one of the ripples, Elach felt a resistance as it crushed against the Issi below it. His heart started beating faster in excitement as he pushed as hard as he could, feeling the ripple dip lower and lower until it was right at the center of his container. He’d felt resistance the whole way through, but it was a constant resistance, not amplifying as he got deeper and deeper like he’d expected. With a sigh he realized that he’d immersed himself in Issi at some point, the ripple having broken the seal when he pushed it too far. The resistance he’d felt was just him pushing through his own Issi with a plate of solid ripple in front of himself.

“Let it go, Flow.” Elach said, and the ripples instantly turned back into what they should be. A movement of Issi that dissipated when they stretched too far. “I think that might work, but I don’t think I can split my focus enough to deal with all the ripples at once. Can you make it so less of them cover my entire container?”

Flow considered for a moment, then shook their head.

“Damn. Thought we had something there.” Elach muttered. “You good to try again, or do you need time to recover?”

Sentence chose that moment to burst into the clearing, not a hair out of place on him. It didn’t look like he’d overslept, if he even needed to sleep. So what had delayed him?

“Sorry for keeping you waiting.” Sentence apologized, throwing a small ring to Elach.

He caught it out of reflex alone, blinking in surprise before studying the small black iron band he held in his palm. It was like his and Sentence’s rings, but far smaller, and there was a seam on one end that was either poor craftsmanship or a way for the ring to snap open. Elach pulled on it to test that, and the ring popped into two halves, a pinprick of a shifting rainbow crystal running through the center of the ring.

“That should keep Flow’s Issi signatures hidden from anyone weaker than I am. Snap it around their leg just above their foot, and it will automatically shift to a proper fit for them.” Sentence explained, and Elach did as he said. The ring snapped shut around Flow’s leg before shrinking into a tight band of black iron, and Flow hopped on one leg to try and get a good look at their new accessory. “It took a little longer than I expected to make, and though it doesn’t make up for my lateness, it is why I took so long to arrive. I apologize for that, and that you lost precious time due to my misjudgment. On that note, did you have any success on your own last night?”

Elach shook his head. “Very little. We got close-ish to something that might work, but it has too many moving parts for me to concentrate on at once.”

“Really?” Sentence raised an eyebrow. “How did you manage it?”

Elach explained how Flow had made the ripples, and how he’d solidified them and then pushed one down into his Issi.

“If you had better control over your Issi, you would be able to push on all of them at once.” Sentence said, crossing his arms and furrowing his brow. “But you should have that level of control over your Issi. It is yours, after all. How many do you expect you could control at once if you tried again?”

“Four? Maybe five?” Elach guessed with a shrug. “And that’s out of about twenty five ripples.”

“Hrmm. Transcendent Issi is far more troublesome to work with than I had expected.” Sentence said. “I dredged up a few theories of my own last night. Maybe in combination with your own findings, we could find a solution to your problem.”

“Hit me.” Elach said, and Flow pecked his ear. “Hit us, I mean.”

“The methods I’ve found are from… unreliable sources.” Sentence rubbed the back of his head. “So there is a chance they may be nothing but hearsay or exaggerations.”

“Unreliable sources are better than nothing.” Elach said. “What do you have for us?”

“Don’t be too disappointed.” Sentence warned, reaching into a bag Elach hadn’t noticed and bringing out a note pad along with some baubles he placed on Flow’s stone table. “Transcendent Issi is, to most, a thing of myth. So that is where I began my search. Finding the common threads between stories, the interesting ideas that seemed at least slightly rooted in reality, you understand where I’m going. But the truth is that all I had to pull from were stories. Works of fiction, though some were based on actual events.”

“We’re testing out myths?” Elach raised an eyebrow. “You really had nothing else to go on?”

“I did not.” Sentence admitted, flipping through the notebook and settling on a page about halfway through. “The first connection I found was that transcendent Issi was commonly described as not its own type, but that of another type that had rewritten its limits and properties so that though it appeared to be the same type of Issi as it previously was, it now needed a different set of techniques to compress and utilize outside of the body. This seems to be a parallel with what you are experiencing, so I scanned for techniques from the bodies of work that used this theory.”

Sentence paused, seeming to get lost in his thoughts.

“And?” Elach asked, bringing Sentence back to the moment.

“And I have put together a few techniques that might fit you.” Sentence said. “They were used by characters who were bonded with a wisp who was as advanced as Flow, so they each have two separate parts for you and Flow to mix and match to hopefully find success.”