Ranvir sat in meditation, enjoying the quiet rustles and murmurs of students and librarians making their way through the library. In the back of his mind his tether twisted calmly around itself. Though he wasn’t meditating in tether-space he was still embracing the pressure.

He had a hard time letting go of his power, after spending so long too medicated to properly hold it. It took a quite bit to stop him from entering tether-space, but only a little to inhibit the use of his abilities. Pain was easier to work through than the pain killers, Ranvir had been surprised to find. And annoyed. He tried once time to keep off the pain killers and work on his power, but that hadn’t led anywhere good. He could tell. It was the same kind of self destructive training as what Esmund had tried with the Three Degrees of Sharpness test.

A book was sliding out a shelf in the bookcases next to Ranvir and fell towards the ground. Then it stopped in mid-air. Ranvir blinked his eyes open and looked through the shelves to the row behind him. A librarian had pulled out a book and was reading it where he was standing. As Ranvir watched, the man shook his head and put it back.

Ranvir frowned, turning back to his meditation. It had felt like it was falling, which was an improvement. He couldn’t always tell if anything was happening at all, but he’d still been way off from what actually happened.

Pursing his lips, Ranvir tried returning to his meditation, but caught sight of Kirs making her way to his table where he was sitting and he abandoned the idea. Ranvir rubbed his hands over his eyes, the scars around them were still sensitive, but lightly pressing against his eyelids gave a soothing sensation.

“Hey.” Kirs said. “They’re still bothering you?”

Ranvir blinked his eyes open and smiled morosely at her. “I don’t know if they’ll ever stop. It’s worse in the mornings though. Still, I can see just fine. Master Stjarna said it was as very complex expression and the eyes are delicate so there might be some issues.”

That was why he had scars around his eyes. Master Stjarna had been so focused on the damage to his eyeballs and the function of Ranvir’s sight that smaller things had slipped his expression. Namely the small burn scars. He wasn’t sure what had happened to Ranvir’s eyes or why his pupil had ‘leaked’, but Ranvir could see clearly so it was an overall win.

“Well.” Kirs said. “I’m sure it’ll get better over time, but that’s not why we’re here.” Her lips split into an eager and proud smile. “Esmund’s advancing soon and we’re going to help him.”

Ranvir nodded. “Do you have anything we should start on?”

Kirs pulled out her notebook, cracking it open. “I’m already working with him on the ritual. From what little I know, more control of his tether should make the process faster.” Ranvir nodded. “Master Svenar is already handling a lot of the issues on his side and he has a lot more experience with this subject than the rest of us. Oh by the way, I don’t know if you heard, but we’re all invited to come watch Es’ advancement.”

Ranvir nodded a wry grin on his lips. “It’s Es we’re talking about. He’d barely gotten within shouting distance of us, before he’d invited the entire group.”

Kirs let out a giggle, as she turned her attention back on the notebook. This meant she missed Ranvir’s weirded out look. “Well, I have a few ideas for other places to look, but the most obvious place to start with the greatest masters of Elusria. The one’s who’d advanced the most.”

They went through a lot of books, journals, memoirs, and biographies. Ranging from the increasingly mad rantings of the Twin Master Agnur, to the self-important drivel of Vagnen, an ice Twin Master who died some two centuries ago. His power had gotten to his head and he’d taken on a huge battalion of flesh-torn and gotten his flesh torn.

Needless to say, things weren’t as easy as Ranvir’d hoped. There were very few books that went over the process in detail, which confused Ranvir. Even going to the scholar section and looking through their books he found precious little.

Suspiciously little.

Ranvir frowned as he looked over the books of some long dead principal of the academy. He hadn’t made it to Twin Master, but he’d been convinced he had the right steps to get there. Of course, he never did so Ranvir wasn’t sure if he should be reading the man’s notes.

“He mentions dead threads.” Ranvir said, pausing at a specific passage and looking up at Kirs.

She yawned and looked at her notebook. “That’s the sixth time someone’s mentioned withered or dead threads. Any idea what it means?”

Ranvir shook his head. “No, but he thinks removing them is paramount to advancement. Calls them ‘Rot growing on the tethered’s connection to the Triplet Goddess’.”

Kirs winced, noting down in her book. “That’s a little intense sounding.”

“You have no idea.” Ranvir replied, closing the book. “He was obsessive about the Goddess and his role as a tethered. I quote: ‘The Goddess needs our power to be pure and true, we must excise all the demons of our earthly connection to shrink the passage between us and her holy presence.’”

Kirs looked up frowning. “Earthly connections?”

“By which he means, family, women, money, alcohol, and a whole bunch more. He has like three chapters in this book about things you can’t do.”

“Women, or partners?”

“Women, he didn’t believe they were capable of getting close enough to the Goddess to every truly become her guardians.”

Kirs winced. “That’s uhh… worrying that he was a principal.”

“I haven’t even scratched the surface. Wait until you find out how he feels about normal people, who aren’t tethered.”

“He thought they should be eradicated?” Kirs almost sounded like she wanted that to be the answer.

“Of course not.” Ranvir shook his head. “They could still give birth to tethered.”

Kirs rolled her eyes letting out a disgusted groan. “How did he become the principal?”

Ranvir shook his head, “From what I can tell? Politics. The Master’s Council needed something from the Lords’ Council and he was the concession. He lasted barely five years in the position, the shortest amount of time any principal has ever held the seat, I think.” Ranvir scratched his chin.

“Nah, technically that goes to Jorgen.”

“Jorgen?”

“He was the principal for a whole three weeks.”

“What happened?” Ranvir asked, closing the book he’d been reading. There wasn’t anything good in it anyway.

“He was overseeing the construction of the Masters’ Tower and they dropped a stone.”

Ranvir winced. “Death by boulder, that’s a tough way to go.”

Kirs shook her head. “He was on his way up the stairs, to where they were working when it dropped. The stone shook the tower and he slipped. Fell right down the stairs and broke the back of his head open.”

Ranvir blinked. “That’s so mundane.”

Kirs shrugged. “When you’re not embracing the pressure you’re just normal people and normal people die easy.”

Ranvir shivered, the thought of him walking into the principal’s office without embracing the pressure seemed even dumber now than it had previously. He would have to learn to always keep in the state. He’d maintained it since Kirs arrived, but he knew that a few hours wasn’t the issue. It was keeping it up a few hours, every day that became the issue.

Hopefully, he would soon have worked through that issue, but he was suspecting that he might running into issues of the limits of power as a pre-stage before he managed such a feat. All the more reason for why he needed to advance faster.

“Are you finding anything?” Ranvir asked, extracting himself from his thought process.

“Nothing much.” Kirs closed another book, rubbing at her eyes. “I think I’m reaching the books where Master Agnur stopped teetering on the edge of madness and just jumped into it.”

“No mention of advancement, though?” Ranvir asked. “He was a Twin Master before he went mad, right?”

“Yeah, he was.” She replied. “But no, there’s nothing. He only left behind like four books, but still he didn’t mention it once? Nor any of his apprentices.” She looked at Ranvir, and easily read the thoughts portrayed on his face.

“You think there’s something more going on?”

Ranvir nodded. “Something’s definitely going on. Let’s just pick the scholars. Ragnhild made it a big priority in her work to examine the tethered and advancement. But for some reason she took no accounts of actual tethered advancing to new stages and the processes there in?” Ranvir shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

“Yeah, neither do I.” Kirs remarked.

Ranvir sat back in his chair. “So what do we do?”

“We read Harald Stonetooth’s books.”

“The Triplet Master?”

Kirs let out a long sigh. “Yes…”