Beginning with the two-year-old version of him, every single reflection of his began to conform various parts of their soul structures to some unclear instinct. All around him, infinite replications of various thread clusters shifted and twisted and turned and contorted and reformed. He couldn't keep track of all of them, but each one was Mimicking an affinity.

They inundated him like a memory, like a thousand memories all at once. He experienced the sensations, heard them, deep sonorous songs, vibrant colors, textures. A hundred emotions, greed, fundamental change, adaptation. Each thread cluster conformed to something beyond his perception.

Then the two-year-old lifted a hand, fingers flitting swiftly through arcane gestures. Every other reflection did the same. They were casting different spells.

Thousands of versions of himself actively plying every discipline of magic known to him… and more.

Combustion, Dynamism, Optimization, Fluxion, Kinesis, Sanation, Astral, Venefic, Binding, Divination. And so much more.

Even with his eyes closed, tears flowed freely down his cheeks. A tangible conviction steeled in Caen's heart. It was a solitary flame he had learned to keep hidden away, but now it consumed him. He saw, he understood, he wept.

And he would have them all.

* * *

Not even a minute after Sh'leinu closed the mirror-room behind her, she slumped against the entrance.

Her mana was plummeting at an abominable rate, and her will, which she had refined over the course of more than fifty years of magical practice, strained beneath the weight of the ongoing working.

She ended the ritual prematurely, limbs trembling from the early signs of will fatigue.

“Caen!” she scolded, as she pushed back into the room. “What by all the Entity’s lights did you do?!”

* * *

“—en. Caen.”

Caen jerked awake, his head pounding. The painful light of dawn stabbed through his eyes. He closed them quickly, letting his speculon handle sight. He felt so tired and sleepy and so, so hungry.

His father was crouched over him, a hand on Caen's arm. “Hey, I was knocking for so long and got worried when you didn't respond. Are you okay?”

“I… think I need to sleep some more,” Caen said. This had happened the other day after he'd gone into Redshadow with Zeris and Aunt Vensha. “What's the time?”

“Nearly 7 in the morning,” Ergen said. “Your mother and I wanted to go into the tri-clinic today, help out a little bit. We thought you'd like to come with us.”

Caen nodded, placing his head back on his pillow. “I… I'll meet you there," he forced out.

“Alright, then. We—”

Caen drifted back to sleep while his father was talking.

* * *

Three hours later, Caen woke up to the chirping of birds outside his window. He put aside his pocket watch and stumbled out of bed. The hunger was a storm in his stomach, and he could smell pancakes.

Halfway down the stairs, he heard his parents laughing at something Aunt Grena was saying. Ergen was flipping pancakes, Sh'leinu was leaning on the counter beside him, and Grena was slouching at the table. They all turned to Caen. He reached out with his spirit tendrils and grazed all their spirits in greeting.

“Hey there, sleepy head,” his father said. “Come and have some breakfast.”

Caen rushed over and piled a stack of pancakes on a plate. They smelled so good. He began shoveling them into his mouth without a fork.

“Do you get hungrier when you use your Mimicking ability for long?” his mother asked, curious.

“Sometimes,” Caen admitted. He'd told her last night that he'd used Mimicry in the mirror-room. And that had apparently more than doubled the strain and cost of the ritual beyond the typical range. In hindsight, he should have expected that.

“Mom, the visions—”

She lifted a hand, cutting him off. “Don't tell me. Whatever you saw in there is yours alone to know. It is about your journey, no one else but you can make sense of it, that's why you experience it alone.”

Caen nodded. She'd said something similar last night, though not in as many words.

“Now hurry up and get dressed,” she said. “We've been waiting for hours.”

Caen continued gorging himself with pancakes as he rushed back up the stairs to freshen up.

* * *

Caen walked into the tri-clinic with his parents. There seemed to be more healers here today than there'd been in weeks. His father had helped him cleanse his spirit of slag on the train ride to Drenlin and had been shocked by the degree of buildup.

Coming in through the back entrance, his parents grabbed their green vests and hurried to their separate sections. Caen, in the meanwhile, went to help out with triage at the front desk, where he and two Edict acolytes sorted patients based on their complaints. He did this for a few hours, using Soul-sense all the while. He could only pick out thread clusters when they were active, so he just focused on familiarizing himself with the other elements of people's souls.

He was soon making his way to the Dream-guarding section. He intended to spend a few hours assisting his mother with her patients, after which he would move over to the Spirit-healing section to assist his father.

Just as Caen walked in, he connected to Sh'leinu. At the same time, a patient stood up from across his mother, thanking her profusely. The rooms used for Dream-guarding procedures were usually far more comfortable and homely than those in the other two sections.

“How long does it typically take you to Mimic affinities?” his mother asked in Olden Vishic. It was her native tongue, in a sense, and would lend them a measure of privacy due to how foreign and obsolete it was.

“It takes a little longer for people I haven't Mimicked before,” Caen replied, sitting down on a chair by the corner. “So, give or take, half an hour.”

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“Fine then, I'll attend to a patient while you do that. We can attend to the next one together if you're done by then. They booked an appointment.”

As a public service, the tri-clinic didn't have a system for booking appointments. Which meant that someone had personally requested that she meet with this patient.

Intrigued, Caen got to work, and Sh'leinu called in another patient.

It took him well under thirty minutes to Mimic her Dream-guarding affinity. As soon as he did, he cast the time display spell just because he liked it so much. He waited several minutes longer for Sh'leinu to be done with the patient.

She glanced at Caen, an eyebrow raised.

“It's done,” he said with a nod.

“Good. Once I put the patient under, go into the Seam. I'll come and get you.”

Her appointment was a young girl of about twelve with puffy, tired eyes. She walked in hand in hand with an older relative who might have been her mother or aunt.

Sh'leinu sat the girl down and spoke kindly to her for a moment, explaining what the procedure would entail. The girl's chaperone was seated beside her, clutching her hand tightly as though scared the girl would vanish the next moment. With a quick spell, Sh'leinu eased the girl into a trance and then fell into a trance of her own.

Caen had already precast the astral projection spell in order not to waste any time. He discharged that spell now and was immediately pulled into a trance as well.

His consciousness was wrenched into the Seam: the place of dreams and the subliminal.

A thick, roiling fog covered everything, and Caen thought he saw something move in there. High-pitched and supernal sounds echoed all around, and it was all Caen could do to hold onto his awareness as a representation of his heart hammered in his chest. He kept very still. Doing so wouldn't protect him from danger, but it slightly reduced his chances of drawing the attention of anything out here. The fact that his soul structure was duly represented here brought him a measure of comfort. He could also sense his body and spirit far more clearly than he'd been able to yesterday at Vai's.

The cord of connection ran from his chest out into the fog. His connection to Sh'leinu was fraying. Caen focused on it, trying to slow down that sense of fundamental regression.

Then someone placed a hand on his shoulder. His mother, her soul structure overlaying her astral form. The connection between them stabilized.

“Verify my identity,” she said, as she always did whenever she brought him along for a Dream-guarding session. Without magical verification, one could never trust anything they experienced in the Seam.

“Mimicry allows me to cheat,” he said. “I can tell it's you.”

She hesitated. “Are you certain?”

“I'm certain,” Caen said, but just to put her at ease, he cast the spell.

It usually took him minutes, but now, in a few seconds, he cast the spell. It was a simple bimodal scan. Specters possessed distinct features that were magically distinguishable from those possessed by practicians. Over the years of doing this, Caen had become fairly acquainted with his mother's mental signature, almost like how he could identify some of his relatives from their spirits alone.

The feedback from the spell was always either a yes or a no. Now, it returned a yes, verifying that the mental signature he had fed into it was standing just across from him.

“Done,” he said.

“It's always important to verify,” she said, sounding only slightly relieved.

The next moment, they were standing in a very tiny room within her mind palace. From there, she projected them both into the girl's mind.

They were in a shifting scene of horrific happenings. It was nighttime. The girl stood in place, eyes unfocused and mouth slightly parted. And all around her, people screamed, begged for help, and ran for their lives.

Swarms of pony-sized ants with wickedly sharp pincers and legs skittered about, killing people, eating them, dragging them towards a quaint house out of which grew a humongous tree with girthy roots and branches that grabbed onto people and pulled them towards itself.

Caen had never witnessed a Planar break before, but this looked every bit like some of the descriptions he'd read about and watched in memory crystals.

“There,” Sh'leinu said, pointing at a screaming man. He quickly morphed into a writhing monstrosity that then puffed into smoke. A boy who had been cut clean in half and had been crawling towards the girl, begging for mercy, also morphed into a specter.

Just like its companion, Sh'leinu banished it. Then she gathered the girl up in a motherly embrace. The next moment, the scene shifted to daytime. They were in a grassy field with the low sound of chirping birds and a cool breeze. The girl lay on a bed of flowers, seemingly asleep.

“Poor girl,” Sh'leinu said, caressing her forehead. “She was one of the survivors.”

“The survivors,” Caen said carefully.

She glanced at him. “From the Odaton break.”

“How weak were your oaths exactly, Mom?” Caen asked. His parents had both been sworn to silence on the matter.

“Weak enough,” she sighed. “And very poorly constructed. We're done here.”

Caen blinked away his trance, lifting his head. He was back in the examination room with Sh'leinu, who was speaking quietly with the patient and the older woman. There was some commotion outside, however.

Caen stood up to check. He could see several people moving down the corridor. A healer ran in that direction, green vest fluttering behind her. Caen caught the arm of an acolyte who was sprinting past him. “What's going on, brother?”

“Brother Caen! Chancellery officials are here to speak with all the healers. It's an important announcement. Brother Nabik asked me to gather everyone.”

He rushed away before Caen could ask any other questions.

After opening the door to tell his mother what was happening, Caen followed the flow of people.

Just by the entrance of the helpers' lounge, a crowd of healers, auxiliaries, acolytes, and patients surrounded a trio of neatly dressed women in crisp military uniform in the Rialgarian colors of red and green. One of them held a stack of papers in her hands.

“—are casting a wider net this time,” the shortest of the officials was saying. “It’s imperative that this goes out to everyone, and I'm passing this information across to all the healers in here, whether or not you agree with me.”

Even as she spoke, more people streamed towards the lounge entrance. Caen stopped by a pillar. The short official glanced around, clearly waiting for more people to arrive.

Soon, she held a hand out to the side, and one of her associates handed her a stylized scroll, which she unfurled slowly for obvious effect. The crowd quieted.

She cleared her throat and spoke loudly from her diaphragm. “Executive Order 7413. To all hands and minds that can offer willing aid, this is an appeal to you. Odaton is in desperate need of healers, helpers, and arcane combatants for the second phase of the reclamation efforts. The Republic will owe its gratitude to all capable citizens who make the noble choice to lend their help.

“Airships will be available for transport twice daily for the next five days. If you choose Rialgar, Rialgar will never have to choose for you. All who have already sworn oaths of silence in regard to this matter prior to the reading of this Executive Order are mandated to present themselves for immediate transport at the Courthouse Building, effective immediately. This decree is signed by the esteemed Chancellor Aimaya Rowach, faithful servant of the people.”

The healers began to raise their voices in inquiry around the official, but she ignored them as she exchanged the scroll in her hand for a piece of paper and moved over to a bare wall beside her, where she pasted a copy of the executive order.

Caen frowned in contemplation. Why had they released their healers, only to recall them in under two days?

He locked gazes with his father. As they pushed their way towards each other, Caen paid attention to his father's face, and he could see how well Ergen was trying to hide his distress.

“Your mother and I will have to leave now,” his father said as soon as Caen reached him.

“I'll help with your luggage,” Caen said. They hadn't even moved their things from the temple after coming in yesterday.

Together, they headed for Sh'leinu with quick steps.

They found her outside the examination room, speaking with a man in uniform. The man left with a polite nod to them.

“What was that about?” Caen asked her.

“I thought we’d have more time,” Sh'leinu said, sighing. “The Chancellery needs me to call on my brother.”