Caen conjured a small orb of flame over his palm. Its orange hue shifted to a startling mix of purple, pink, and red.

Aunt Vensha swept her hand in front of them. “Tahal,” she swore. “It really is as hot as Zeris said. And you're using a… memory to do this?”

“Not really. I feel like it's getting easier somehow. I'm just thinking about how much I want to conjure Passionfire, and that seems to be enough.”

Zeris grumbled something under her breath. Caen patted her shoulder sympathetically with his free hand.

They'd walked into a sparse woodland with darkened, leafless trees that grew purple moss on their trunks. Aunt Vensha had initially dissuaded the odd shadeling, killing none at all, but they'd come in here in hopes of finding some.

“And you're sure you'll be able to extinguish this Passionfire if it gets out of hand?” Aunt Vensha asked.

Redshadow possessed an interesting property that suppressed open fires. And while it wasn't impossible to set the planar materials here aflame, it was difficult. Almost as though the entire plane had been warded against fire.

“Typical extinguish spells worked on it when I practiced earlier today,” Caen said. It was just an extra layer of precaution.

Up ahead, a one-tail moved smoothly across the grass, eerily silent. It paused when it spotted them, then slowly it began to approach.

Caen added a modifier to the spell construct. Even though he couldn't see the construct, it was well represented in his visualization through intricate geometry. The modifier was a complex shape that overlapped the primary components of the spell boundary.

The orb of flame shot towards the shadeling. The creature slid out of the way, and the grass where it'd been caught fire.

Zeris made a sound in the back of her throat. “This is the guy that's supposed to have better aim than me.”

Caen would have retorted if his mind weren't so occupied. He could feel a strong pull on his willpower as the Passionfire spread on the grass. He extinguished it quickly. Passionfire continued to drain the will as it spread. That was important to note.

He conjured two orbs of flame and reapplied the former modifiers and then some to the spell construct. The remaining two orbs of flame shot out of his palm, curving towards the shadeling. It tried to slip out of the way again, but both orbs landed on their target.

They broke against the shadeling's side and back, forming splotches of magenta that quickly began spreading. The creature writhed and jerked from side to side, but made no sound.

It bared its black teeth, widened its maw, and ran at him. Caen's fingers flitted through gestures. The spell construct for a fire whip collapsed. His spirit had failed to smoothly execute the requisite patterns.

Oh, I got carried away, he mused, his spirit already contorting into the patterns for something within his current abilities.

He'd been using spells so effortlessly that for a moment there, he'd just reached for an appropriate spell, despite him being utterly unpractised and inexperienced with it. Caen had never even tried to adapt the fire whip spell. For once, a spell failing didn't have anything to do with his abjection at all. Spell schemas needed to be personally adjusted to one's spirit and mind, and this took time and effort. Caen had spent some hours last night trying to fully adapt some of the spells he could already cast. He'd used a boosted affinity, of course, and fully intended to do much more of that in the days to come.

His new spell took, and he conjured a fireball about the size of his fist. Magenta streaks appeared in the fireball as he Impassioned it with Ardor. Several hastily applied modifiers made it spin and dart straight for the shadeling, engulfing its entire head.

The creature fell on its side with an audible thump. The flame spread to the surrounding grass, but Caen quickly extinguished it with an involved gesture.

He was speechless.

Vensha whistled in appreciation, approaching the corpse and prodding it with her foot. She fanned aside a plume of smoke and miasma.

“You did that with just a standard fireball?” Zeris asked.

Caen nodded. “And it only used up as much mana as one without Passionfire would. Though my will has taken a serious dip. We're seriously going to have to measure how potent this thing can get.”

“To think this isn't even the conceptual part of it,” Zeris mused, glancing at the ball of flame she still had hovering over her hand. Her face became a tense mask of concentration, then she sighed.

Huh.” Vensha rubbed her chin. “Might be that I try this out for myself. Who's to say I don't also have this bloodline?”

Caen eyed her. Vensha generally looked down on elemental magic. She'd told him many times that people who relied on their magic to do all the work for them were lazy. Of course, Caen had never shared that opinion. “I thought you didn't like Fire magic,” he said.

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“Not when it can do that. I have a rating just shy of 4 in Fire. I'd be wasting a good advantage if I don't put it to use. Anyway, we should get moving. All this burning is spreading miasma all over.”

They moved away quickly, Caen occupying himself with practicing more Fire magic exercises. He conjured several tiny orbs of fire and moved them between the fingers of his left hand carefully. His control was still lacking, but that was only because he hadn't yet adjusted to the novelty of having so much punch to his spells.

They soon came upon a pack of one-tailed shadelings. About ten of them. Aunt Vensha and Zeris moved to handle the shadelings, but Caen hung back.

He deactivated Soul-sense and could immediately feel the strain of maintaining the orbs of flame he'd conjured. He could sense his affinity… reverting at a much faster rate than usual. He looked at his soul structure and located the thread cluster that represented his affinity for Fire magic. It reverted to its former shape, form, configuration, vibrance, frequency, and texture.

The orbs of fire had begun to flicker, and he could tell the spell construct was destabilizing. Quickly, he Impassioned the orbs. The spell collapsed immediately, orbs of fire winking out in a hot puff of air. His affinity had fully reverted to abjection.

Using more complex workings and taxing his spirit after cutting off a connection apparently reverted his affinity near instantaneously. Curious.

He looked up and saw Vensha batting aside shadelings with her halberd, while Zeris kept conjuring increasingly complex fire whips around herself to keep them off.

Caen activated Soul-sense on a shadeling. Its soul structure was hardly all that different in composition from the mass sample he'd taken since he’d gotten this ability. Though, of course, he'd known this on the first day.

The shadeling's soul structure overlaid its canine bodily shape and shuddered chaotically. Its physical body also spasmed as it moved.

“Are you the one doing that?” Vensha asked, kicking aside a one-tail.

“Yes, happened last time too. It's part of what made me suspect that Soul-sense might have some Dampening effects. I think I'm disrupting something in the shadeling somehow. I just don't know what.” He scratched his head. “Maybe I'm disrupting its magic?”

“You did it several times with that Valiant too,” Zeris said. “What was her name, again?”

Hez. The Valiant who had used Body-enhancement and Fire magic spells. Even before their fight, he'd disrupted her spells by just flickering Soul-sense.

The shadeling was still moving with unsteady, twitchy steps.

“I want to get a better feel for this shadeling's soul structure,” he said. “Can you keep it busy a while longer?”

“Go for it,” Aunt Vensha replied.

Zeris pushed back Caen's target with a swirling whip of fire, but burnt through the shadeling beside it.

Caen focused on acquainting himself with the creature's soul structure. The thread clusters were still incomprehensible to him, but their chaotic fluctuations added an extra layer of complexity to the whole ordeal.

“I want us to keep moving,” Vensha said after a few minutes.

“I need more time, please,” Caen replied with a little effort.

They'd gotten rid of nine shadelings, leaving alive the one he was still connected with. Aunt Vensha had been keeping the rabid, ever-spasming shadeling engaged all this time, and for some reason, it hadn't run off yet.

“Let’s take it with us, then,” Zeris suggested. “It's just one shadeling. It can't be that hard.”

Vensha huffed, casting a glare at her niece. “Have you ever tried capturing one of these before? They're slipperier than a catfish in water.”

It was strictly illegal to bring Planar creatures out from an Aperture, more so in Redshadow than in the surrounding Planes. There were certain crafting licenses that permitted the removal of living shadelings from Redshadow, however. Caen had once seen a party bind up a two-tails and transport it out of the Aperture. That had required very specialized equipment though. Being able to observe the soul structures of two-tails up close might clue him in on how their tails were able to split into identical copies of themselves. He was very curious about that. But had no reliable means of restraining such a creature.

Deactivating Soul-sense, Caen helped Vensha bind the antsy one-tailed shadeling with a length of rope.

Securing it was as difficult as she'd claimed. The shadeling kept trying to bite him, and somehow they couldn't keep a very firm grip on it. Caen eventually wrapped it in a nest of carefully placed knots, looping around its limbs and the arch of its back several times. He tried to make it as comfortable as possible. He constructed a handle for him to haul the creature by, but Vensha insisted on carrying the shadeling herself, even knowing that it would start spasming again once he connected to it.

They spent an hour longer, moving through different patches of woodland, sometimes stopping in clearings. All the while, Caen focused on the captured shadeling's soul structure. It eventually stopped spasming, however, which allowed him to view its soul structure better.

There seemed to be two very prominent thread clusters. He started isolating the elements of one of them, which seemed harder to do in the shadelings than in any of the humans he'd mimicked before.

A weariness had seeped into his bones, into his mind, his spirit. He felt heavier and more tired. A migraine had bloomed behind his eyes. His progress was slowed down by this. If Mimicry did in fact involve body, mind, and spirit, that might explain why he felt such a holistic exhaustion.

Caen caught movement in the corner of his vision. He turned to look, but saw no one. After panning his surroundings for a while, he concluded that it was his exhaustion catching up to him. They were out in the open, and Aunt Vensha was keeping watch.

When he returned his attention to the shadeling, he was surprised to find it perfectly still. He might have thought it was dead if he didn't see its tail twitching every few seconds. Perhaps it had tired itself out.

Once Caen was done isolating, he examined the thread cluster closely. He didn’t know what affinity it represented or if it even represented an affinity. Still, it felt very familiar, like a flavor he couldn’t quite place his finger on. But at this point, his migraine had become nigh unbearable. He deactivated Soul-sense.

“Okay, that's it for me,” he said, rubbing his temples.

There was a ball of flame hovering over Zeris’s palm. She sat opposite Vensha, who was carving a piece of wood, while occasionally casting her attention to the shadeling that lay bound a few feet away from them, thrashing soundlessly.

“Any luck with Passionfire?” he asked Zeris.

She sighed. “Nothing yet, and I'm very low on mana.”

“Then we should go and get some rest,” Vensha said, rolling her shoulders and putting aside her carving equipment.

Caen cut the shadeling free while Vensha held it in place. She swung the creature down the mound they were standing on. It landed on its feet, seemed to look up at them, then turned and scampered off.