At dusk, Caen went down to the Southway market square to grab some ridiculously oversized fruits, but the eccentric farmer who sold them hadn't opened shop that day, so he settled for normal-sized fruits.

He and Zeris recovered their equipment from the temple and geared up. Vensha had made a series of tiny perforations into the brow section of his helmet. The holes were arranged in the base-Ortrillian glyph for protection, but more importantly, they were so closely packed together that his speculon would have little trouble seeing through them. After making the modifications, Vensha had dropped the helmet by his door before he'd come home last night, and he hadn't gotten to thank her yet.

He and Zeris took the next train out of Drenlin. Most outbound trains went past the Planar archway, allowing Valiants to hop on or off as needed.

On the train, while he looked over his soul structure, they chatted idly about Beslin gossip. Despite Zeris being rather unsociable, she always seemed to have a great handle on the rumor mill.

He paid attention to his spirit when they approached their hop-off point. He could sense nothing. That chill he sometimes felt wasn't present. And even when the Valiants lodge had come into view, he could still feel nothing.

Vensha was waiting for them at the archway. She was alone and fully decked out in enchanted armor. Her halberd was strapped to her back, thumbs hooked in her belt. Light blue feathers had been painted onto her dark helmet in a recurring motif.

“I thought you said you'd meet us here?” Caen asked, surprised to see her at the archway so early. They'd agreed that she would come down from Mal-dawn, the other nearby Plane, well after sundown, so Caen had been expecting that he and Zeris would be the ones waiting for her.

“I arrived an hour ago. Didn't want to leave anything to chance. Next thing I know, you'll be recounting another ridiculous story to me.”

Caen rolled his eyes. “Thank you for the helmet, by the way.” He rapped his knuckles on it. "Works like a charm."

“It's lost some of its integrity, but anything it can't stop would kill you anyway,” she said.

“Very charming as always, Aunt Vensha,” Zeris said, laughing.

Caen snorted. “Let's go.”

They made their way to the archway. After engaging their insignias for the bored-looking Watchers, they entered the Plane.

A blanket of sharp tingling ran all over his body as soon as he crossed the Aperture. It felt like sharp pinpricks sweeping across his skin. This happened every time he entered a portal. Most Valiants, in fact, experienced a similar enough sensation, regardless of the Plane—though of course the sensation was much less uncomfortable for others due to the passive augmentations a spatial affinity granted. It was a well-documented fact.

However, those mysterious chills he occasionally felt whenever he came in close proximity to the Redshadow archway were an entirely separate phenomenon. No one else he'd asked experienced chills when they walked through an Aperture, to say nothing of experiencing it while they were a fair distance away from one.

He cast a halfhearted glare at Zeris and Aunt Vensha. “You're both staring at me as if I'll grow a fifth bloodline on my head any second.”

Aunt Vensha chuckled. “Well, if you do, just say something.” She'd taken out her polearm in her hand. It had a foot on her in height, and the shaft was half as thick as her forearm. She'd forged a replica of this for Caen on his sixteenth birthday, but he didn't use it much.

She looked around. “Where did you say you saw that seven-tails again?”

“That way,” Caen said, pointing towards the section of woodlands he'd entered with Ellu's party. “One of the outcroppings down there.”

“Great. We're going in the opposite direction, then.”

“Would that make any difference?” Zeris asked.

“I have no idea. Come on, let's move.” She glanced at Caen. “Is Mimicry activated right now?”

Zeris's eyes widened, and she pointed at Vensha, nodding her head emphatically. “See? See? A proper name!”

“I said the exact same thing yesterday morning! He’s such a stubborn person.”

“I feel we can do better,” Caen said. “This committee is still in deliberation.”

“Caen, my dear cousin,” Zeris said, as if she were speaking to a little child. “What, pray tell, happens when you use Soul-sense?”

Caen smirked. “I don't feel like answering.”

“I'll answer for him,” Aunt Vensha said, twirling her halberd. “He mimics

their affinities. This follows so naturally, it's outrageous you don't agree.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“It's destiny,” Zeris said. “Fits like a glove.”

“Agree to disagree,” Caen said, smiling. “It's activated, by the way,” Caen said to Aunt Vensha. “I’m currently boosting my Fire affinity from Zeris. I've had to keep her in my field of vision all day.”

This was the first time the three of them had been able to discuss ‘Mimicry’ together. Yesterday morning, Tuni had been with them.

“That sight-dependence is a very inconvenient restriction,” Aunt Vensha muttered. “The time it takes to mimic the affinities as well. You said thirty minutes, right?”

“Twenty to thirty minutes, depending on a few things,” he said. “I haven't done enough testing to say for sure, but that's why we're here.”

A one-tailed shadeling prowled towards them. Lone one-tailed shadelings didn't often approach groups of three and above, but there was always the particularly aggressive outlier.

Aunt Vensha stabbed at the shadeling with the butt of her halberd. It didn't immediately relent, but after a more forceful prod, it backed away and scampered off. She didn't want to cut into them because of the miasma their corpses left behind and the likelihood of that drawing even more shadelings. She'd grown especially cautious in this Plane after her experience with a four-tails.

Zeris was moving a spark of fire between her fingers. “What do you have in mind?”

“I’ve been meaning to really push this ability. Test it thoroughly, find out its limitations, but for now, I want to cut down on the time it takes for me to… 'Mimic’ an affinity. And like Aunt Vensha mentioned, sight-dependence is a restriction I'd like to do away with, if possible. It'd be great if I didn't have to spend so long boosting my affinities, so that's my priority for now. Just trying to cut down the time.”

He asked them to keep their spirits busy. He'd already noticed that thread clusters were nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the soul structure when spells or magic of a relevant kind weren't being actively cast. If passive augmentations were represented here, he couldn't tell.

Caen disconnected from Zeris and connected to Vensha.

Once he was done, he asked Zeris for the time. She had a mental construct that she cast every day. It displayed the time in her mind down to the minute. When she replied, he let out a sigh.

“That's over twenty minutes. It took me a little less than that yesterday morning when I Mimicked your affinity.”

Aunt Vensha gave him a vindicated, evil-looking smile.

“Get over yourself,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Let's see if I can improve my speed.”

He connected to Zeris this time. She was still using a Fire spell. He Mimicked the affinity in about twenty minutes.

He asked her to switch to a Spirit-healing spell, and it took him less time than with the others. Eighteen minutes. Then he had Vensha use Spirit-healing as well; about twenty minutes.

As Caen jotted down his thoughts in his notebook, he wondered whether this disparity was a function of the gap between their affinities. Zeris had a slightly higher rating of 9.0780 on the Peilker Scale, as opposed to Vensha's 6.6121. It could just as easily be influenced by his level of familiarity with their soul structures. He’d had more practice with Zeris’s soul structure than Aunt Vensha's.

Caen fell into a rhythm, cycling through pairing his affinities with theirs. Zeris would alternate between Spirit-healing and Fire magic, while Vensha would switch between Spirit-healing and Body-enhancement.

He could distantly hear them chatting, though his attention was too encumbered to take in anything they were saying. They handled the one-tails, never actually killing any. Though he did see Zeris burn one unlucky creature something fierce.

It wasn't difficult to tell which magical discipline was being used each time because every single one of Zeris's and Vensha's relevant thread clusters retained the same general location on either of their soul structures, so he always knew where to begin looking. The difficulty, however, lay in the other steps: isolation and imitation.

He isolated the intertwined tangles and convoluted jumbles of various textures, sensations, sounds, vibrations, colors, dimensions, and impressions. And then he imitated them, conforming his own thread cluster to them. He went about repeating this process over and again. Location, isolation, imitation.

Afterwards, he tried to see if he could determine any intrinsic properties of a Spirit-healing affinity. He fortunately had three samples. When he tried to use Soul-sense on both Zeris and Vensha, he felt an intuitive aversion to that and stopped immediately. If he tried to power through it, he might harm himself in some way, while still failing to achieve what he wanted. It reminded him of the time he'd torn a muscle as a child while trying to speed up his flexibility exercises.

He alternated between viewing Zeris's thread cluster and Aunt Vensha's, and comparing these to his own. These were the thread clusters that represented their individual affinities for Spirit-healing. It was slow, arduous work, and Caen hungered to understand. He took extensive notes, many of them half-formed thoughts that he would go over later. Eventually, one distinct feature made itself known: a vague impression. Caen had them both switch to Fire magic just to ensure that this specific impression was a unique property of the Spirit-healing affinity. They switched back to Spirit-healing, and after paying attention to the impression for a long while, all he could interpret was the notion of ‘anomalous communication’.

After puzzling over that to no avail, he took a break. They were sitting on a small hillock carpeted in the black grass of Redshadow.

“You should have aimed for his head,” Aunt Vensha was saying to Zeris. “Worrying about fallout is something only the living can do. Valiants die from hesitation more often than you'd believe. Next time, don't hesitate.”

“I changed my mind at the last second,” Zeris admitted with a sigh.

“Wait, really?” Caen asked, causing both of them to turn their heads to him. “I thought you missed.”

“‘Missed’?” Zeris scoffed. “Caen, I'm a better shot than you.”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” he said, laughing.

“Find anything?” Zeris asked.

“Not much,” he said, cracking his neck and flipping through his notebook. “Just a vague impression about something something communication. I think I'll have to observe it for much longer.”

Aunt Vensha grunted. “So much work. Right up your alley, I’m sure.”

“You know it,” he said and began taking more notes.