They cleared the table and did the dishes after dinner. Aunt Grena had retired to bed, and Vensha had gone down to the commune saloon to meet up with friends. Caen sat at the dining table with Zeris and Uncle Teiro.

  “Are you sure you won't stay the night?” Sh'leinu asked from the living room, where she and Ergen sat, cuddled on the couch, reading a book together. “It's not very safe around these parts, especially if you're walking back to Drenlin.”

  Sh'kteiro smiled. “Lein, I'm not an Attuner.”

  Caen chuckled at this. Uncle Teiro had a very charitable and gentle demeanor, making it easy to forget that he was not as helpless as he appeared. There were bandits and a few wild beasts out here, even more so than around Drenlin. Nighttime made these all the worse, but Sh'kteiro was a Percipient. He was very close-lipped about what that entailed, but Caen had heard stories about what they were capable of. Even without spells, Sh'kteiro could definitely defend himself.

  “At least use the train,” Sh'leinu said. “It's late.”

  “Walking is good for the mind,” Sh'kteiro laughed.

  Sh’leinu huffed good-naturedly and returned her full attention to her book.

  “So you said you wanted to try sensing my… soul. You think it might work this time?” Sh'kteiro asked Caen.

  “My time in Parthra has given me a few ideas on how I might go about sensing the soul structure of someone at a higher level of magic. It also confirmed something I noticed in Odaton.”

  “Which is?”

  “Some soul structures are easier to interact with than others. All the more so when I share a bloodline with them, or—” Caen lifted his arm, signaling his fragment, “a magical bond.

  “Mimicry works so much better on my fragment than on other fragments. And I can sense the souls of Ereshta’als a bit better than everyone else's. This is even more true for Dad, Aunt Grena, Aunt Vensha, and Zeris, because we share two bloodlines.”

  “And your mother?” Sh’kteiro asked.

  “It's the same,” Caen replied. “Stronger connection; leading me to suspect that the fourth bloodline comes from her.”

  “Which would mean that I… have it too,” Sh'kteiro finished. “What you're saying then is that you and I share two bloodlines. Interesting. And you still have no idea what this fourth bloodline is?”

  Caen shook his head in the negative. He'd spent some of his initial days in Parthra scanning his spirit to glean insights about that mysterious fourth bloodline, but had made no headway.

  “Multiple instances of Interactance,” Sh'kteiro mused. “Interesting.”

  Caen focused. He kept his ties to Sh’kteiro at the forefront of his mind. They shared two bloodlines. They possessed an intrinsic interrelation. That had to count for something.

  When he extended his existence to Sh’kteiro, there was fairly less of a strain in their connection than there'd been last time, but as expected, a bright blur overlaid Sh'kteiro's form, and Caen couldn't make anything out. Though he could swear that there was something just outside of his perception. It was the strangest feeling.

  He severed his connection and made a few more attempts. The results were the same each time. The mere act of attempting this was a great deal more exhausting than when he typically used Soul-sense on Attuners. It was curious to him. Parthra's soul structure hadn't been exhausting to view in the slightest, and that was a being that dwarfed his understanding.

  “Your aura acts strangely whenever you do that,” Sh'kteiro noted.

  Caen's attention snapped to his uncle. “I have an aura?”

  This was a fairly contentious topic, and Caen had never been able to find any true consensus in his studies.

  Some researchers claimed that only those above the stage of Attuner possessed auras, while others insisted that everyone possessed an aura. This was the problem with not having easy access to a highly accredited library. Grat was a seedbed of misinformation.

  Sh'kteiro smiled serenely. “Of course, you have an aura. Everyone does.”

  Even Zeris was looking up from her tome now, listening. Uncle Teiro was adept at evading any questions about the higher stages of magic. They'd asked him a similar question about auras some years ago, and he'd avoided answering.

  “Auras remain dormant and mostly unmoving in Attuners,” Sh’kteiro continued. “Percipients are those who, amongst other things, know how to control their auras and sense the auras of others.

  “I didn't quite notice it before, but there are tremors upon yours. And whenever you use this ability on me, I feel as though my aura has been brushed by another Percipient whom I cannot immediately perceive. It is clear to me, as I watch you now, that your aura is not reaching towards me. Yet it trembles, which is certainly notable.”

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  Did this mean that his aura stood out to the senses of mages and beyond? He held on to something his uncle had just said. “‘Mostly unmoving’,” Caen repeated. “So it isn't rare for an Attuner's aura to tremble, then?”

  “In a state of heightened emotion or involved spellcasting, auras tend to tremble, but not always.”

  Caen nodded at this. “Are there ways for an Attuner to manipulate their aura or keep it still?”

  “None that I know of. However, years before I took the step into a higher stage, my brethren of the Priesthood commented that my aura often roiled, which perhaps was due to my looming advancement. Though, of course, I could sense none of this.”

  Caen chuckled darkly, most of his apprehension fading away. “So, anyone capable of noticing the movements in my aura might mistake me for a peak Attuner?”

  “The irony,” Zeris mumbled.

  Sh’kteiro smiled.

  Caen was mid Attuner.

  After one more failed attempt at sensing Sh'kteiro's soul structure, Caen gave up for the night. He wasn't eager to give himself holistic exhaustion, and his uncle had a long trek ahead of him, anyway: Drenlin was nearly five hours on foot.

  Sh’kteiro said his goodbyes and stepped out of the house, Caen escorting him. The night air was on the kinder side of warm, for a given definition of ‘kinder’. The commune was free of traffic, but soft music filtered from the saloon off to their distant left.

  As a child, Caen and his uncle used to take a lot of long walks just observing the scenery and chatting about whatever came to either of their minds. Now, they walked leisurely and spoke about Sh'kteiro's pilgrimage and Caen's progress with channeling Planar light.

  Caen closed his eyes and, using his speculon, could see the stars overhead far more clearly than usual. He longed for the day he wouldn't need to close his eyes to use his speculon. His mother had said that this would come in time, but perhaps there was a way to speed that up. He asked his uncle.

  Sh’kteiro laughed. “You cannot rush it, Caen. Full sight will come to you when it comes to you. Especially now that you're on your way to mastering the Planar light.”

  Caen smiled and shoved his hands into a pair of several pockets he'd sewn onto his trousers. “Well, I look forward to being able to see more than one thing at once.”

  “Hmm. That can certainly be done with your speculon. See, speculons do not bring objects into focus in the same manner that eyes do.” Sh'kteiro tapped his own speculon. “Everything within view of a speculon is already in focus. Your will is what lets you concentrate on specific portions.”

  Caen perked up at this. “So I just need to split my mind and focus on two different points using my speculon?”

  “It's not nearly as easy as it sounds. There are—” Sh'kteiro laughed. “You're already trying it, aren't you?”

  It felt like trying to have his eyeballs look at different things at the same time. Physical eyes were linked in such a way as to prevent individuality. His speculon seemed to be operating under this same principle. Even with his mind split, there was a strong mental resistance to the very notion of using the same organ to do different things at the same time, and it forced the two portions of his mind to combine.

  Sh'kteiro nodded when Caen said just as much to him. “There is an exercise I learnt just before my induction into the Priesthood. Your will is very developed for your age and condition, and I know how determined you are. It's more of a willpower exercise than anything else.”

  Caen listened intently as his uncle explained the exercise to him. It involved focusing on various portions of his speculon in a dizzying sequence, followed by an attempt to focus on two of those portions simultaneously.

  They had walked a short distance away from Beslin at this point, and Caen had to return. Despite himself, he couldn't help worrying about his uncle, but Sh'kteiro was very confident in his own safety.

  Caen bid his uncle good night and headed for the communal garden. On his way there, he passed the generalhouse: a three-story building at the center of the commune, with lamps lighting the surrounding area. He counted nearly forty people queuing in front of a pair of wide open doors, waiting their turn to use the potency gauge.

  Caen soon reached the communal garden. It was a parcel of land enclosed by a metal trellis that held up edible crawlers. Within the garden were trees and lush patches of crops, made freely available to all residents of the commune.

  An ancestral grove sat in a corner where a bunch of slender trees had been ornamentally grown to have their branches curving and twisting smoothly around each other. The various branches met and intertwined in a manner that was pleasant to look at. A five-foot-high metal structure sat at their center, with smooth, flowing plant tendrils coming out of it and wrapping around the trunks of the slender trees.

  Caen walked past it and went to a small patch of berries. He harvested a few of them along with some soil and put them in a sack he'd brought out with him. Caen had packed lots of soil and plant matter from Parthra, but Frerit-ya-tess had mentioned that feeding his fragment with enough variety might be helpful to its growth.

  By the time he'd returned home, Zeris had gone into her room, and his parents had slept off on the couch, cuddled together. Someone had placed a kilt blanket over them. Zeris, most likely.

  He hauled the sack of soil to his room, placed his fragment within the sack, and bade it to feed.

  He left for the generalhouse and found that the queue at the door had thinned. A middle-aged relative sat off to the side of the entryway, overseeing the usage of the potency gauge.

  After only half an hour of waiting, Caen got his turn to enter the storage closet that housed the device. It was a long metal cuboid, a glass dome glistening atop it.

  Crystallizing mana on his fingers, Caen placed them in the designated slot. He waited quietly as the machine hummed softly, processing his mana.

  Its reader displayed his results, not in decimals but in whole numbers.

  Eight categories. Ratings of zero in five of them. Blood-healing, Flora, and Spirit-healing were the exceptions.

  An affinity rating of 1 in each. Caen faltered.

  None of his newly ‘unabjected’ affinities felt like any of the 1s he'd Mimicked.

  He tried again. The results were the same. Ratings of 1 that felt much stronger than they should have. Curious.

  Caen smiled to himself and began his walk back home.

  He’d done it three times. And soon, every other known discipline would follow.

  “It won't be long,” he whispered to himself.