I have a problem.

I’m in the glass studio again, alternating between imbuing the final pieces of Rakesh’s glass armor and doing commission work for Ember. Our goods are selling as soon as they hit the market, and Ezio’s cousin is convinced that we can expand our operations soon. Unfortunately, the limiting factor is still my rather meager mana Capacity. This much imbuing everyday leaves me with a wicked headache and my channels on fire.

During lunch break, I eat at my work station. I drum my fingers on my workbench, thinking over my conundrum. It's an age-old question. What do you get for someone who has everything?

For as long as I've known her, Melina’s been the definition of self-sufficient. She quietly displays some of the most jaw-dropping Skills around, largely keeps her own counsel, and is always three steps ahead of the rest of us when it comes to life planning and the pursuit of her goals. Still, I refuse to believe that I can't come up with a suitable gift.

Sketches of armor, wands, and mana-imbued jewelry are scattered around my desk. For once, I've barely touched the food that Kirsi packed for me, too caught up in my frustration to finish. I've scrapped all the options so far. Melina doesn't need the protective gear Rakesh does. She relies on her Skills to keep her safe by controlling time around her and ensuring that she's never in a position of danger.

Ugh. I need a better schedule if I'm going to finish these projects before Casella and Mbukhe join me for my excursion into the Rift. I can't fight if I am constantly running on fumes. And I have no idea how quickly my glass pseudo cores can recharge in the energy deficit of a new Rift. They can often take weeks to build up mana parity with the outside. Time is working against us; Casella thinks we have about one week, at most, until a Royal army patrol can investigate.

I push another rough sketch away from me, annoyed at my splitting headache. My tolerance to the pain seems to be going down, not up. I drop my forehead into my right palm and rest my elbow on the top of the workbench. If only I had more mana.

“That’s it,” I say, leaping to my feet. There is exactly one thing in the world that I can give Mel without worrying: mana. It's so obvious in retrospect that I smack my head. She's got her own methods to obtain just about everything, but thanks to my new advances with my imbued glass pseudo cores, I'm uniquely equipped to give her a worthy gift. Why didn't you think of it earlier? Stupid, Nuri. Get your act together!

As advanced as she is, she hasn’t broken through to the Second Threshold—no surprise. She is still half a decade early for that, even as a prodigy. That means her limitations are inherently a Capacity issue, which is a problem that plagues most crafters and mage types until late in life. If I can artificially push her up half a Threshold, then she will be truly terrifying for her age.

But why stop there? I'll have to be careful not to go past the resonance limit, but there are plenty of options. Maybe I can make her less visible, if I can figure out how to combine the concepts for hidden or discreet along with the complex runes from Mbukhe's stealth Skill. Realistically, that level of craft is still well beyond my abilities, but as I push into my limits, I start to catch a vision of a staggering future, an unbounded horizon of endless possibility.

I pick up my pen and twirl it between my fingers while I think. Stealth makes more tactical sense for Lionel, he needs to pass undetected in the battlefield and deliver aid and healing wherever it's needed. Weighing him down with armor or assigning him a bodyguard will only slow him down and spread the team's resources thin.

What if I can make two sets of rope beads for Melina? If she stores them far enough apart from each other, then maybe she can just switch between them when one runs dry. It's still tricky to make sure that they don't interact, but maybe if they're each at three quarters of the capacity my pseudo cores have, then cumulatively she'll be fifty percent ahead. The only problem is that I won't know her limits until after I make the investment into the cores, and if I miss calculate, then she'll be missing out on that last quarter of potential Capacity boost.

Might as well just get to work on a standard set for her, while I brainstorm other ideas. Maybe inspiration will strike. And even if not, at least the work will be done and I can move on to my plans for the rest of the team.

Now that I have a plan, I'm suddenly aware of just how ravenously hungry I've become. My stomach gurgles in disgruntled protest at the sight of my unfinished lunch. I scarf down my meal of flatbread with goat cheese and honey, piled high with a mix of sauteed vegetables. Kirsi always spoils me. Sated, I wipe away the crumbs, and trot over to the furnace to prepare a suitable batch of glass for the compressed, artificial cores.

I wish I had more mana, too. I lick my lips, wetting them to stave off the dry, crackling heat of the furnace. Melina and I would both benefit from additional mana Capacity; I only wish that I could stack additional strings of the cores, like layers of pearl necklaces, so that I’d never run out. If I had enough mana, then I could use [Vitrification] on the shiny steel ball bearings I saw one of the younger [Smiths] creating at the forge. That would save me time making my own glass.

I snort at the thought. I’m a [Glassworker] and proud of it. When did I get so impatient? I don’t need to take shortcuts, or obsess over my mana. I’m not a [Mage] or a [Warrior], and I need to remember that no matter how much I might overlap with their roles.

“No buying or borrowing steel,” I mutter to myself as I work with the glass. I take a small section, not gathering too much for the first go. Marbles don’t take that long to roll, and I’m not worried about adding extra colors or crafting the most aesthetically-pleasing result, so within a few moments I have a smooth, round little globe of glass that’s ready for imprinting.

My mana control is improving each time I practice this technique, and now I rarely crack the glass or have to start over. The amount of mana I can store in each of the cores is still fairly trivial, but enough of them strung together adds up over time. I ought to be able to finish the entire set by dinner, as long as I stay focused on my work. All I have to do is keep the right imagery in mind.

The mana is drawn to the powerful concept of home, of yearning for a place to belong, and the first core is finished imbuing with ease. An hour later, my head is starting to spin. I take a seat, trying to catch my breath, as I suffer from unexpected backlash. The problem isn’t simply mana-overdraw, although I have been pushing myself hard. An entirely different source is at fault: the tension between the concept of home and the longing I have to explore. The dissonance is growing with each attempt, and if I don’t take a break to sort it out, then I’m afraid I won’t be able to finish the project.

Everything I’m making for the team is in service to my own plans. Yes, they benefit, but I’m the one who has an insatiable need for adventure. It’s like a sickness, a fever burning away within me. And now, paradoxically, the greater my desire to help my team, the worse my work turns out.

“Nuri? Everything all right?”

I lift my head and smile weakly as Melina comes over to check up on me in my distress. “Yeah. Just thinking.”

“About?”

Does she always have to be so nice to me? For once, I want to avoid a conversation with Melina, since I’m making her a present. I shrug and try to sound non-committal. “Oh, you know. Life.”

She arches an eyebrow. “Should I be worried?

“It’s all good,” I say reflexively.

“Out with it,” she demands, sliding over a stool and sitting down next to me. “I know that tone of voice. Something’s bothering you, and you’re going to worry at it like a dog chewing on a bone until you’re too wound-up to get anything done. So. What’s on your mind?”

“Ah, not much. Just an imbuing roadblock.”

Melina makes a face. “Think I can’t help you anymore, huh? You’re too good for your old friends?”

I laugh. “Never.”

“That’s what I thought,” Melina says brightly. “Now start talking!”

“Fine, fine,” I say with some reluctance. “I need to balance out two competing concepts. I can’t seem to reconcile them in my mind.”

“Which one speaks to you the strongest?”

I shrug. “Depends on my mood. But I need to focus on only a single one for imbuing, since I can't split my mind into parallel lines of thought. That would be an impressive trick.”

“Indeed! I wonder if Ezio has a Skill like that. You might want to talk to him about mental abilities.” She purses her lips and taps her fingers on the top of the bench. “Are you sure you haven't trained to do just that with your puzzle orbs?”

I tilt my head to the side and stare up at the ceiling while I think over her question. " No, not exactly. Solving the puzzles is still accomplishing the same goal, even if the patterns are different. What I'm trying to do is hold on to a tiny raft of a concept for dear life while a competing concept buffets me around like angry seas in a storm.”

“Sounds to me like you have to believe in your vision more firmly.”

“But that's just it! I don't know if I do.” I find myself chewing on my lip without meaning to, and I make myself stop so I don't look so wishy-washy and overly distraught. I set up straight and compose myself. “What about you? Any changes to your dreams and ambitions since we last spoke? I still can't believe you want to sail the seas.”

Melina blushes furiously. “And I can't believe you remember that conversation! Thank you for not breathing a word of it to anyone, by the way. No real changes, although now I know who I want sailing beside me. Who knows when I’ll see Padouk next at this point. He's not well liked here, but I appreciate that you cleared the air with the others about his involvement with your escape plans.”

“Let's go to Naftali,” I blurt out.

Melina blinks. “Right now?”

“Once I'm done making your present,” I say with a wink. “Well, and the gifts for the rest of the team. They'll need them for our journey.”

“We can't just leave, Nuri,” Melina says, but the way her eyes dart around as though she’s an animal trapped in a cage, searching frantically for a way out, makes me think she wants nothing more than to leave everything behind.

“Why not?” I ask her quietly. “Isn't this what we're training for? I thought everyone agreed that the next time I have to leave town, you're not letting me out of sight. If I tell you that means going to Naftali, will you come?”

“I . . . I need some time to prepare and to pass off all my work. I can't just up and leave.”

I grin. “I mean. That's what I do.”

Melina laughs along with me, but it's an uncomfortable, fragile sound. She squeezes her eyes tight for a long moment, then wipes away the drop of tears in the corner of her eyes and shakes her head. She looks at me sheepishly. “No, no. I—I need more time.”

“Time! That's what I was missing,” I shout. I snap my fingers. “Mel, I’m going to give you a crash course in complex runes. Then I need you to draw what you see in your Skill fractals when you use your temporal zones. If you help, then we can crack the code and copy the time-related runes. Then we can find a way to accelerate mana harvesting.”

“That’s . . . that’s the work of a lifetime, Nuri,” Melina says slowly. “I will need to learn what I'm looking at. We’ll need a baseline for how long the mana harvesting takes, like Rakesh and Ezio always say. Then we’ll have to test each rune in isolation to ensure clarity and precision with the results. There’s no way we can do that in the timeframe you seem to have in mind.” To her credit, she doesn’t discard my idea out of hand, but simply moves on to discussing the nitty gritty details.

“Anyone else would take months. But you? You’re a genius, Mel. You can pick up enough of the runic shorthand to help me in no time. Thanks to the literature I read about the mana control test, I don't need to research absorption rates. They're already a known constant, apart from mana Skills. I think that's everything. So if you're willing to draw all the shapes you see, then we can get moving quickly.”

“What happened to Naftali? Really, Nuri. It’s impossible to keep up with you sometimes. You jump around more than a flea at a dog show.”

“Flattering comparison,” I say wryly.

Melina laughs at my look of offense. “You’re a bad influence. Now I can’t shake the thought of traveling to Naftali. But didn’t you want to go to visit the [Menders]?”

“That too. We can go there later. Naftali is a perfect trial run. Padouk can sell our goods when we arrive, and then join us for another journey—this time without all the subterfuge and pretense.”

“They’re in opposite directions. Seems like it would make more sense to skip Naftali altogether,” Melina says, her voice going flat.

Poor Mel. Easier to just shut down than to let impossible dreams flourish. Hope deferred is too hard to endure.

“Either way, we need to get you outfitted. I've got to get back to work. Stop by the house tonight for dinner? Bring Ava. Reijo and Kirsi always love to see you two. I'll loan you my notes; we can put together a plan.”

“And my gift?” Melina teases.

“You wanna use your fast annealing Skills? I can have it ready for you tonight if you don't mind spoiling the surprise,” I offer awkwardly.

“Better have one ready for Ava, too.” Melina chuckles. “I can see by the panic on your face that you need more time, so I’ll save you from my sister’s tongue-lashing and wait until everything is ready. You’re very sweet to think of us, Nuri.”

I sketch a bow. “I have my moments.”

“All too rare, unfortunately,” she murmurs, but the glimmer in her eyes tells me that she’s highly amused. “Now get to work. I want my present!”