“Ow,” Caen mumbled, rubbing his smarting forehead and squinting at the light of day streaming through his window. Vai hadn't flicked his actual forehead, but it hurt all the same.

His pocket watch told him the time. 8 in the morning. It was still four hours later than when he usually woke up, but Caen was resolute on returning to routine.

“Alright, let's get to it,” he said to himself.

His reserves were still quite low, but a quick simulation of Untor's Boulder verified that his will was renewed. Sleep was the ultimate magical panacea. Sort of.

He spent an hour cleaning the remaining slag from his spirit, all the while humming that vocal analog to himself. Afterwards, he began attuning ambient mana, then went through some basic meditation practices and a few of his morning rituals. It felt like he hadn't gone out onto the roof in weeks. Though spending his last Astral moments on Vai's roof had been nice.

He grabbed his lute from the place where it hung on the wall. This was a far more subpar instrument than the one he'd used in Vai's mansion, but he was able to produce the notes he wanted. He spent some minutes strumming it and humming along with his vocal analog.

When he unfurled his existence to examine his soul structure, he confirmed that his thread cluster did not make the same sounds nor give the same impressions it had back when something had changed in him.

Then he threw on his weighted vest, put on his boots, strapped his training glaive onto his back, and went for a run, attuning mana all the while. He checked, but Aunt Vensha wasn't in her cottage. The commune was alive with activity. Caen's spirit was gently grazed by a wandering tendril every few steps.

He stopped to catch his breath at the copse of trees by the commune's edge, and there, he practiced his combat forms. As he moved through the motions, he hummed with each breath, trying to sort of connect to the idea of that note.

A little over an hour later, he was back home and in fresh clothes, having taken a warm bath. He was whipping up a stir-fry with some leafy greens he'd plucked from the communal garden when Zeris came downstairs with bedhead.

“Care for some?” he asked.

“Thank you. I could eat a whole house right now,” she said, dropping into a seat at the dining table. “Find anything useful at Uncle Vai's library?”

“Not really. He said he'll help me look.”

She snorted. “How'd you trick him into that?”

“My charm and lovable personality.”

She rolled her eyes. “What's that you're humming?”

“I Revisited my memory of Soul-sense with Uncle Vai. I made a vocal analog of what it felt like.”

“Oh, nice. When do we start?”

“After we're done with breakfast.”

* * *

Caen unfurled his existence again, and immediately, he and Zeris's soul structures became apparent to him. They had come outside to practice. They sat now in a field of grass littered with the occasional tree and higher up on the hilly terrain that harbored Bestlin. They'd laid out a mat beneath the shade of one of the trees.

A cute, tiny puppy with yellow, fluffy fur sat on Zeris's lap, wagging its tail as she gave it affectionate scratches behind the ear. It belonged to their cousin, Saya, who probably owned as many dogs as there were people in Beslin.

They'd found it loitering in the commune, and Zeris had opted to carry it here with them. A locket hung from the leather collar around its neck in the manner Saya identified her dogs, but there was no name engraved in the locket yet.

Using Soul-sense on the dog showed that it too had a soul structure. And surprisingly enough, so did the tree they were sitting under. There wasn't much else to see, though, and nothing much stood out in either the dog or the tree. Although he did note that the ground around the tree's base seemed to grow ghostly, as he saw the rest of its soul structure extend all the way down into the soil, overlaying the roots there.

Caen stopped attuning mana; he'd need all of his attention for this. He focused on the glowing lines of light that made up both his and Zeris's soul structures. He connected and disconnected to her several times while she left her tendrils out, like that first time.

It was difficult to pinpoint any meaningful changes within her soul structure. The lights altered in brightness even when she wasn't actively using any magic. The threads twisted and vibrated in a beautiful cacophony.

“I’m switching over to Fire spells,,” Zeris said after a long while. A myriad iterations of using Soul-sense helped Caen better distinguish her voice from the rattling vibrations that accompanied it. The puppy now slept quietly on her lap. “Maybe I can do something with Ardor, too. You never know.” She'd been cycling through different Spirit-healing exercises all this time.

As soon as she made the switch, Caen saw something change in her soul structure. It was so subtle he'd almost missed it.

“Wait, stop. Switch back to Spirit-healing and then back to Fire. Slowly, please.”

She did. He had her switch back and forth till he made out what exactly had caught his attention. A tangled cluster of threads winding around her torso flared whenever she used Spirit-healing, but using Fire caused a different thread cluster to flare in his senses.

He traced out the thread cluster, and a third of the way in, he realized with excitement that it resembled the one he'd memorized in the Revisitation sequence with Vai. Once he was done with this, he tried to isolate the specific sounds, sensations, and impressions it made. It was almost like picking out a grain of salt from a mound of granulated sugar.

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In time, he'd completely isolated every component part of this thread cluster. It looked and sounded exactly like his own had sounded in the Revisitation.

This confirmed that he had somehow… mimicked this thread cluster in Redshadow. He had somehow replicated it in himself back then. And now he knew which portion of his soul had been altered.

He examined his soul structure and noticed something he hadn't noticed before. The parallel thread cluster in his soul, the one that had been changed back in Redshadow gave him the impression of malleability now. It felt flexible, almost as though it were begging to be… reshaped, remoulded.

Magical instincts were not infallible. They did not offer optimal directions or solutions, and were not exactly a shortcut to proficiency or mastery. What was important to him now was the fact that instincts prevented people from causing serious damage to their minds and spirits.

Cautiously, Caen followed his instincts. Years of using the Ereshta’al bloodline had taught him to trust that intuitive grasp.

He started humming that vocal analog he'd constructed at Uncle Vai's. And as he did so, he began remolding his own thread cluster. There was texture to them. Colors. Vibrations. Notes. Dimensions. All these and more, he brought into conformity with Zeris's.

He was done before he knew it. His focus had been strong as steel. That thrum in his being matched the vocal analog he'd continued humming all the while, but more importantly, it matched Zeris's own thread cluster.

Caen knew that something in him had changed. Something fundamental. The speculon on his forehead tingled. He could feel the passive augmentation to his spirit in a way that he hadn't back in Redshadow. He knew things he had never known before now. A primal, instinctive knowing. He could sort of feel his spirit for the first time in his life. It was a sensory dimension that had been barred to him. Even without lightly scanning his spirit, he was aware of just how much mana he had left and where exactly he'd find slag if he went looking. Caen's eyes watered.

The razor-thin black line connecting him to her felt as tightly braided as a cord, even more tightly braided than it had that first time in Redshadow. He'd stopped humming, so Zeris looked up at him.

“What?” she asked. “Why are you smiling at me? Did it…?”

His fingers were already flitting through distinct gestures. His spirit contorted into familiar patterns with unfamiliar grace and speed. The visualization in his mind was clearer, more stable than it had ever been.

He sent a probe into her spirit while leaving his spirit tendrils out. Caen had never been able to do this before now because of his abjection. His spirit was perpetually rigid, and the more complex a working, the harder it was for him to execute it with a sizeable portion of his spirit mass unretracted.

Zeris's eyes, faded as they were beneath the overlay of her soul structure, widened in surprise. Then she broke out laughing. “By the Eye!”

Caen laughed along with her, startling the puppy awake.

“Is this permanent?” she asked.

Some of the mirth drained out of him, but not enough to sour his mood. “I’m not so sure,” he said.

When he looked at his soul, the changes he'd made felt fundamental, but not… permanent.

“It's like I've jumped up into the air to improve my vantage,” Caen told her. “I know I'll drop back to the ground. I just don't know when.”

Zeris scrunched her nose at his analogy.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. My point is that we need to do lots of testing.”

He dismissed his probe and began contorting his spirit into another shape. It moved rigidly as he performed the patterns of a Fire spell, but not to the extent that he had to retract all of his tendrils. This was still so much better than casting in his abjection. Though of course, the spell failed in the end. None of his spells were properly adapted after all—he couldn't adapt spells due to his abjection. He tried a Gleam spell next. Then a Dream-guarding spell. Kinesis. Vibration. Blood-healing. Body-enhancement.

His spirit remained unwilling to cast in any discipline but Spirit-healing. He hadn't deactivated Soul-sense yet, and it seemed as though his connection to Zeris was sustaining the boost to his own Spirit-healing affinity. He would have to verify that. But first.

“Zeris, could you try casting a Spirit-healing spell? I want to see if any of this affects you negatively.”

The next moment, her probe encircled his own spirit.

“No changes whatsoever," she said, moving through a series of other Spirit-healing exercises.

After jotting down some notes, he closed his eyes and could perceive his own soul structure fine enough, but he could only sense the non-visual elements of her soul structure. He could feel his connection to her weakening and unraveling, but the moment he snapped his eyes open, the connection stabilized. “Still strongly tied to sight.”

They tried different ranges. As far as Caen could see her, he remained connected to her. He ended the connection and was pleased to verify that he could replicate the boost to his spirit even from a long distance away, though that took far more time and effort.

He ran a mile away backwards from where she was sitting, and when the curvature of the earth hid her from view, he could feel the connection weakening.

He climbed a tree and was able to see her once more. The connection stabilized. When he dismissed the connection and tried to reactivate it again, he felt some strain before the connection clicked into place. So, distance was a hindrance, but not much of one.

He stayed by the tree for a few minutes, crying quietly, his limbs shaking.

After all these years…

When he returned, they tried a few more iterations of this. As long as he kept her in the periphery of his vision, he could maintain his connection with her. His eyes also didn't need to be focused on her to initiate a connection, though that was harder to do as well.

After an hour of mostly range testing, he experimented with flickering Soul-sense, and Zeris noted that it did, in fact, interrupt her spell casting. Not by too much, though, especially not when she focused on the spell more intently. He would have to experiment with this some more.

He kept an eye on his reserves and was very pleased to note how utterly mana-efficient the ability was. Then he timed himself while trying to conform his thread cluster to Zeris's. It took almost thirty minutes. As with all the other times, he could once again cast Spirit-healing spells with supernatural ease.

“I wonder if I can recreate this for other people,” Caen said as they sat down drinking some of the now-warm iced tea they'd brought from home. “Boost them somehow.”

“Boosting the spellcasting of others,” Zeris mused. “That would essentially be Amping magic.”

Caen didn't know any Amping spells, but what little resources he'd had access to implied that Amping as a discipline was not usually self-directed. It helped empower others more often than not. So far, this ability had only empowered him.

In only Spirit-healing, though, he thought solemnly.

“Let's try boosting my proficiency with Fire magic,” Caen said as he put his cup down on the wooden tray beside him on the mat. If this thing only worked to boost Spirit-healing, he was better off knowing now, so he could manage his expectations.