Liv sat at the base of the waterfall, on a great slab of granite that jutted out over the dark water. She could see the shadows of the boulders beneath the cataract, all jumbled together beneath and surrounding the place where the cascade from above descended, creating a constant haze of mist.

She wore her armor, because it would be foolish not to so close to the front lines, and even though she would have rather let her hair tumble free, Liv kept her helm on. The memory of Henry’s head, knocked backward with the shaft of an arrow jutting out of his eye socket, was more than enough reminder why it was necessary.

Even with a full dozen of her guards, in their blue jack of plate with the white mountain blazoned on the chest, stationed all around the waterfall, there was no reason to be foolish. Liv might, privately, have thought that the number twelve was just a bit excessive, but after the enemy Antrians had mounted a harassing strike from the heights above the cascade, Kaija was not willing to take even the slightest risk. Nevermind that they’d seized that ground immediately, and held it still. In fact, if Liv had looked up, she could have seen a watch tower, grown by Kerian soldiers, rooted just above the falls. She knew that it was manned by at least two sentries at all times.

The main encampment would have been more secure, of course, behind a wooden palisade which encircled nearly the entire plateau, complete with ditches, watch towers, and two gates. Being surrounded by nearly fifteen-hundred soldiers, complete with their horses and cook-fires, latrines and patrols, was not, however, the best place to practice spellwork. Liv had found a new appreciation for the relative studious quiet of Coral Bay; at least everyone who went there had come, ostensibly, to learn magic. Somehow, her father had even had an anvil hauled across the desert, so that a forge could be set up!

Here, at least, the subdued roar of water hitting the rocks drowned out any sound from the camp - which made it the best location she’d yet found for the experiment she was conducting.

In her lap rested the stormwand that Julianne Summerset had brought to Whitehill as a young woman, and then carried for the next twenty-seven years. It was a length of ancient, yellowed bone - a piece of Sivis, Vaedic Lord of Storms, taken from his corpse by his own daughter, Mirriam. Sigils had been carved into the length of the wand, and then inlaid with silver and gold. The handle was wrapped with leather long worn smooth, stained by sweat from the palm of Liv’s adoptive mother. That would be the newest piece, and likely had been replaced many times over the twelve-hundred years since the wand was first enchanted.

“Are you going to actually do anything with it, or just stare at it all day?” Aira tär Keria called, the old woman’s voice raised to be heard over the waterfall.

Liv turned, and couldn’t help but smile at the sight of the elder picking her way down a steep slope of bare earth, intermittently broken by brush, grass, and trees. Old roots, exposed by erosion, served as steps. Aira clung to the arm of Liv’s great-uncle, Eilis, who was being very careful about where he set his boots.

“Come and sit by me, Elder,” Liv said, and rose from her place on the boulder. She thrust the stormwand back into the sheath on her hip, reached Aira in a few quick steps, and took hold of the old woman’s other arm to help her find a seat.

“Well? Answer the question,” Aira said, smoothing her skirt out. “I’m not distracted that easily. Not yet.”

Liv and her great-uncle each found their own patch of rock and sat cross-legged, the three of them forming the points of a triangle. “I’ve been studying the sigils,” Liv explained. “I wish I had Sidonie here to compare notes with: she’s always been so good with Vædic grammar. But I’m fairly confident I’ve figured it out, now.”

“Explain it to us, then,” Eilis ka Väinis urged her. With one hand, he swept a portion of his long, blue hair back over his ear and shoulder, so that the entirety of it fell in one long tumble.

Liv’s eye attached itself to a single strand of gray hair, beginning at her great-uncle’s temple, that she had not noticed before. He and her grandmother had always seemed, to her, to be among the youngest of the elders, but it seemed the war was taking a toll on them, as well.

“As best I can tell, there are three separate enchantments,” she explained. “The first is standard - the same focusing elements that we use on every wand and staff made to this day. No surprises there, and I’ve already tested the effects. It works just like my old wand. This, on the other hand, is the enchantment Julianne first told me about.”

Liv drew the stormwand from her sheath and held it where both of the elders could see, rotating the piece of bone so that she could trace the relevant sigils with one finger. “Usually, Luc isn’t the sort of thing you can just fire off, like a mana bolt, or those blasts of burning light Keri and his family use. You have to draw lightning down from the clouds overhead, which means first you have to build up a charge in those clouds. You can cheat that a bit with Cel, by the way, though it won’t let you really aim. With a stormwand, you can skip that buildup.”

“Julianne generally didn’t,” Liv continued. “If she had the time to spare, she used it. If I had to guess, calling down a lightning strike out of a clear sky uses a lot more mana. But I haven’t actually tried it yet.”

Aira reached into a pouch she wore around her waist, plucked out a seed, and then flicked it across the pool of water at the base of the falls. A moment later, a gray-trunked tree grew up from where the seed had fallen, sprouting glossy, dark green leaves and then pink flowers.

“A Kumaru tree,” the old woman explained. “Resistant to lightning strikes. They’re actually adapted to not only survive, but take advantage when it kills off their competitors. Use that as a target.”

“It’s a bit close,” Liv grumbled. “I assume you want me to shield us all at the same time.”

Aira grinned. “Of course.”

Liv took a deep breath, and woke both Aluth and Luc at the same time. Constant practice with the elders since she’d arrived at Feic Seria had made the task, if not easy, at least familiar. Then, she raised the wand and made a sharp, downward cutting motion in the direction of the tree.

Without using an incantation for either effect, she simultaneously created a mana shield of shimmering blue and gold, and drew a bolt of lightning down from the sky. The sharp crack of thunder and flash of blinding light caused her to wince, but the mana shield protected all three of them from the worst of the blast. When Liv had blinked the glare away, and let the mana shield dissipate, she could clearly see the black, scorched earth surrounding the Kumaru tree.

“Is it about what you expected?” her great-uncle asked.

Liv nodded. Casting two silent spells at once was already exorbitantly expensive in terms of mana, and combined with the function of the stormwand, she’d lost, as near as she could tell, eleven rings of mana. A wisp of ambient magical energy drifted away from the lightning strike, and Liv reached out with her Authority to snare it and draw it back to her body. Most human mages would have nearly emptied their reserves with this sort of training - which, she reflected, might explain why it was so uncommon, outside of the north.

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“The third enchantment,” she explained, “took me a bit to figure out. As far as I can tell, it’s meant to actually contain the mana inside the bone.”

Aira drummed her gnarled, brown fingers against her thigh. “There’s a reason that the corpses of the Vædim were generally left where they fell, and then that people - especially humans - avoided their graves. The raw mana pouring out of that bone would be dangerous. It would be like carrying around a rift in your pocket. You couldn’t have something like that in a human city without spreading mana sickness all around you.”

“So I think that what Julianne did at the pass was, when I first felt it, was to actually lower the enchantment, and allow the mana inside the bone to leak out,” Liv said. “And that’s why I could feel it. She must have already been using it to draw mana into herself, by that point. The trick is, I don’t want to break the enchantment permanently - I just want to let a bit of what’s inside leak out, for a short while. And Julianne never actually had a chance to show me how to do that. She might have told Matthew, but he’s either at Bald Peak, or up on the ring.”

She’d been doing her best to not think about her sister-in-law. The healing enchantments on the ring had helped Rose, then Keri, and they would help Triss and her baby. Still, Liv would have preferred to have the chance to visit, and check on things herself.

“You’ve had long enough to look the thing over by now,” Aira grumbled. “I suppose you have an idea, or you wouldn’t be out here playing with it.”

“I do. At first, I wondered if the answer might be to use Aluth to modify the enchantment,” Liv said. “But Julianne didn’t have that word of power imprinted until just before the battle. I suppose that might have explained why I’d never seen her open up the enchantment before, but it doesn’t make sense. The wands were passed down by Mirriam’s descendents - the royal family of Lucania.”

“And they’ve never had Aluth,” her uncle Eilis said, finishing Liv’s argument. “Mirriam herself, perhaps - Aira might recall her list of words - but if so it wasn’t one she managed to pass down to her children.”

“What are you thinking, then?” Aira asked.

“When it came time for the parley, I used Dā and my Authority to keep Henry’s wards from triggering,” Liv said. “Julianne was considered a prodigy while she was at Coral Bay, before she had to leave. I know that her uncle Caspian taught her at the time. I would bet that he at least began to give her rudimentary Authority training. My plan was to try that, but I wanted to be away from camp before I did.”

“Well, a bit of raw mana won’t hurt either of us,” Aira said. “In fact, it’ll ease my bones. Go on.”

Liv extended her Authority to encompass the wand, and felt about for the enchantments worked into it. She took her time parsing out which bit of magic was which, and when she was confident that she’d found the suppressing enchantment, she pressed on it, gently, and then with greater force.

Raw mana erupted from the stormwand, swirling out around Liv and the two elders. The tension in her neck eased, and Liv breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t quite like actually being in a rift: she could already tell that having the stormwand would only delay her trips to the shoals, not prevent them. More like a snack than a meal, she supposed.

Uncle Eilis, Liv saw, immediately began practicing the Elden breathing techniques which would allow him to take in the mana surge without harming himself. Aira, on the other hand, visibly relaxed into the whirl of power just as Liv had.

“That feels wonderful,” the old woman admitted with a smile, closing her eyes for a moment. “Almost as good as a hot bath.”

“I’ll have to keep playing with it,” Liv decided. “There might be a limit to how long the effect lasts. Keeping the enchantment down long enough might exhaust the wand - I wonder if it would need time to fill up again?”

“That sort of experiment might be better done once we’ve finished here,” Eilis cautioned her. “Don’t deprive yourself of a weapon on the eve of battle just to find the wand’s limits.”

Liv nodded, and allowed the suppressive enchantment to return. The rush of mana stopped, like a fountain drying up, though swirling wisps of ambient mana remained scattered around them even then. Liv used her Authority to gather it into herself while they spoke.

“I can cast from two different words at once now,” Liv began. “What’s the next step?”

“Conception,” Aira said, and then cackled and leaned over to nudge Liv with her elbow. “By which I mean you’ve reached the point where you need to make a decision, and then stick to it. Have you settled on how you’ll combine Aluth and Cel?”

“I’ve had a few ideas,” Liv admitted. “Edyth Blackstone was able to cut mana, so I thought about whether I could freeze it, to start with. Could I freeze the mana making up a spell, before it forms? I’m not even certain what that would do, or what it would look like,” she admitted. “I also thought about whether I could conjure hybrid constructs using both words. Could I line my wings in feathers of adamant ice? Launch them with a thought?” she shrugged.

“I also really wondered whether pushing myself to find a new spell to kill with was the right choice,” Liv admitted. For a moment, she remembered Rose’s voice: I’ve gotten a bit sick of killing people, but I like the idea of building things, instead of always just breaking them. “A combat spell is a bit harder to practice with. And if we think about after the war is over, there simply won’t be as much call for it as something that actually helps people. But of course, we have to beat Ractia first. And using her Archmage spell was how Genevieve Arundell nearly beat me.”

“Tell me that you have made a choice, at least,” Aira scolded her. “Because this sounds like a lot of wavering back and forth.”

Liv bit her lip. Saying it out loud would make the decision real, she felt like. Final. “I think so.” She stood up, then clambered down the slope of the boulder. Once she was close enough, she jumped onto the next rock in the tumble, and got herself down to the dark pool of water itself. Then, she reached down with two fingers and touched the surface.

Cel woke eagerly, and ice crackled out from Liv’s fingers, spreading across the water in an ever-expanding circle. Liv removed her fingers, allowing Cel to return to its fitful slumber, and then stood up straight to watch the thin layer of ice drift downstream.

“The act of freezing is removing heat from an object,” Liv explained. “That was what Celris focused on. Leaching all heat and life out of anything that came into his domain, leaving only cold, empty darkness behind. The end of all things, he called it.”

“When you freeze water, in particular, you get ice,” Liv continued. “The water changes form, from liquid to solid. And at the most basic level, the smallest parts of it slow down and almost stop moving, and arrange themselves into patterns. Some patterns are easier for it to form than others, which is why you have to really work to get adamant ice.”

“So the question is this,” Liv said, turning back around to look up at the elders. “If you freeze mana, does it change form, as well? If mana is like steam, and you slow it down enough, will it turn into something solid? If you did, what would it be - and could anyone still use it?”

Eilis sighed. “I don’t have the answer to any of that,” he admitted. “You’re asking questions that are beyond me, Livara.”

Aira, however, was silent for a long moment. “Take a walk and let us be, old man,” she said, after a long moment.

“Will you be able to get back on your own?” Liv’s great-uncle asked the old woman, with a frown.

“I have this strong young girl to lean on,” Aira said, with a grin. “Don’t worry about us. Go on, now.”

The two women waited in silence while Eilis picked his way back up the slope, grasping the trunks of saplings like the rungs of a ladder, to keep his boots from slipping on the loose dirt. Finally, when Aira must have judged that he was far enough away, she spoke again.

“I have some idea what the answer to your questions might be.”

Liv smiled. “I thought that if anyone might, it would be you. Or Ractia.” She shrugged, and climbed back up onto the great boulder so that she could sit down again, facing the elder.

“Mana is already solid,” the daughter of Keria explained. “It’s simply so small that you can breathe it in without ever noticing. Smaller than the tiniest speck of sand you’ve ever picked up from the riverbank, and rolled between your fingers. I don’t think that you can make it any more solid than it already is, Liv. If you’re imagining freezing yourself a brick of mana, something you could haul around in a wagon and thaw out later, I’m afraid that you’re going to be disappointed.”

“Back to the beginning, then,” Liv said, with a sigh. She couldn’t help but let her shoulders slump in disappointment.

“Don’t give up quite yet,” Aira tär Keria said. “What I think you might be able to do, Livara, is kill it. And I can hardly think of anything that would be more terrifying to a mage - or to one of the Vædim.”