A rush of static energy startled Caen awake. He sat up quickly in a groggy haze, reaching with one hand for a glaive that wasn't there while his other hand wrapped around the dagger by his thigh. Then he realized that it was not in fact his alarm ward system that had woken him up.

  Yildriv, the flamboyantly dressed Artificer, stood with his hands on his waist as he looked down on Caen. “Oh, good. You're alive.”

  Caen frowned up at him, then looked down at his script circle to see that it had been compromised somehow. A portion of the tyyr ink had been wiped off in such a way as not to trigger it at all. “Did you just jolt me?”

  Yildriv made a beckoning gesture, and two metal cubes about the size of a fist rose off the ground from where Caen's head had been. “I selected this chamber for myself weeks ago,” the man said. “I needed to be sure you hadn't died in my spot. I made sounds, and you didn't wake up.”

  Caen didn't bother keeping the incredulity from his voice. “And so you shocked me. After breaching my wards. What is wrong with you?”

  Yildriv scoffed. “‘Wards’, he says. This shoddy thing couldn't even keep out insects. I—don’t glare at me. Fine! I'll fix it for you.”

  Caen rubbed at his eyes, holding back a sigh. His head was hurting, his muscles ached seriously, and the hunger. “Ancestors,” he grumbled.

  “Get out of the circle. Come on.”

  Too tired to argue, Caen left the moss covering and reached into his bag for something to eat. He'd plucked a couple of purple-skinned fruits after leaving the bar earlier. He retrieved one of them now. It had the texture of a peach and was a little salty, but its water content was very refreshing.

  Yildriv had wiped off all of Caen's tyyr ink completely and was using a thick, golden pen with intricate, ornate carvings on it. Tyyr ink flowed out of its nib in a thin, consistent flow. He was drawing the circle without any equipment, and it was perfectly rounded.

  “How—” Caen began.

  “No questions while I work,” Yildriv interrupted.

  Caen watched the young man quietly for several minutes. He activated the perimeter and the grounding runes in a fraction of the time it had taken Caen. He used far more components with complex rune combinations that Caen had never seen before.

  “This is impressive work,” Caen praised, examining the ward system.

  “Hardly.” Yildriv gestured all his equipment into a rectangular portal that suddenly appeared beside him. All the tools he'd used stacked themselves neatly on a shelf inside the storage space.

  Caen connected to him immediately, already aware that he'd find a prominent Kinesis affinity cluster in the man's soul. “Did you check if you could fly to the next layer from outside the tree?”

  “It’s rude to assume every Kinesis practician can fly.”

  Caen watched him blankly.

  “Yes, I tried. Found myself back at the very same place I started. Very annoying. I thought I'd cleared a few layers at once. Alright! I've decided in my magnanimity to share this chamber with you. You look bedraggled and starved for sleep. It's the least I can do after waking you. Wait, actually. How frequently do you snore in your sleep?”

  “Try not to jolt me again,” Caen warned, settling back onto his moss covering. He activated the alarm ward system with his mana. It was now primed to him. He wanted to examine the runes, but he could do that when he woke up.

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  * * *

  Caen slept for the better part of each day that followed—nearly twenty hours. He would rouse from sleep amid deep hunger and thirst, eat some fruit, guzzle down water, and then carry out some parts of his routine before needing to go back to sleep.

  His moments of wakefulness were spent meditating on Parthra's soul structure and practicing Flora spells with the vine he'd collected. He took extensive notes about Parthra's soul. It was still a complete mystery to him, but he hungered to crack it. Insofar as the tree remained benevolent. He detailed his progress with Flora magic in his notes as well.

  Flora practicians who participated in the climb needed to slowly acquaint themselves with the Planar materials here. The mere fact that it took some people just a few months—or days, if folklore could be believed—was a clear sign that something strange was happening in this Plane.

  Manipulating Planar materials required either a very high affinity or years of study and familiarization. Caen, of course, could cheat because of Mimicry, which allowed him to use a Planar organism's own affinity to influence it directly.

  According to Mafrolem, the dryad barkeep, and other people Caen met here on the second layer, the vines and other available plant matter in this Plane had some sort of symbiotic relationship with Parthra. Yet, no part of the ancient tree could be influenced or manipulated by anyone who did not possess a fragment. And even still, so few among those who owned fragments could accomplish this.

  Caen did not merely connect to the vine and use its own Flora affinity to practice spells on it: he made plenty of unsuccessful attempts in his abjection as well. He continued alternating between the two, and it helped that the vine itself had a rather low affinity in Flora magic. There was no passive augmentation, but he still paid attention to how easily his spirit moved and in what ways it moved, trying to replicate that for himself each time he attempted casting the spells without a boosted affinity.

  As usual, this brought him dangerously close to risking serious spiritual injury. There would very likely be Spirit-healers here in Parthra, but Caen was not one bit inclined to give himself an injury that would render him nonfunctional for days or worse.

  He worked very slowly whenever he tried casting one of these spells in abjection. He rarely successfully cast any of them without a boosted affinity, but consistent practice and training should remedy that in time.

  Yildriv was away from the chamber for much of the time when Caen was awake.

  Caen fell into a steady routine: sleep for twenty hours, eat, examine Parthra's soul, cast Flora spells, and think about what exactly it took to earn Parthra's favor.

  Talking with dryads here on the second layer had yielded no results whatsoever. And even the other denizens he'd met that had earned fragments of their own couldn't help him figure it out. He was starting to suspect that no one here knew how to impress Parthra.

  * * *

  Caen woke up feeling more refreshed than he had in the past nine days of constant sleeping. He didn't even feel hungry or grouchy. He'd finally paid off all his sleep debt.

  Yildriv was seated across from him in a padded foldable chair. He was buffing his fingernails. “If you're not careful, you’ll sleep your life away.”

  Caen rolled his eyes as he stood up to leave. A few moments later, he was in a beautiful enclosed cavern with stalactites. A clear pool sat at the center of it, reflecting the bioluminescent lights of Parthra.

  He'd been told that he could wash in any of the pools of water found all over this layer. He spent a good while soaking in the pleasantly cool water before washing his clothes and putting on a spare set. He took his wet clothes back to the chamber he shared with Yildriv and left them to dry by the window-like opening.

  He returned to practicing his Flora spells with a boosted affinity while splitting off a portion of his mind to examine his own soul structure and pay attention to the elements of it that appeared to represent spellcasting.

  Caen was working with ropes today. All the Flora spells he knew treated the individual fibers of a rope as separate objects. When he tried manipulating the rope through a single fiber, his manipulation of it was sloppy and awkward, requiring him to stack on modifiers to the spell base. The rope fiber snapped, and Caen moved on to another rope fiber, working even slower than he had before.

  Afterwards, he took the time to examine Parthra's soul structure. He was beginning to make out something else from the connection between him and the ancient tree. Those earlier impressions of safety were no longer so prominent, but they were there all the same.

  This new impression was vague, and he couldn't quite put his finger on it. He moved on to take in other elements of its soul. He did this for the rest of the day.

  That night, he went to visit Uncle Vai in the Astral Realm.