The next day, dawn met Caen meditating on the roof.

  His mind felt sharper, his thoughts clearer, his focus firmer. It was as though his consciousness had been replaced by something greater. Plans he'd been formulating over the past few days seemed to crystallize now. A time construct hung in the corner of his vision. He'd cast it by his own power.

  Last night, he'd diligently practiced the exercise Sh'kteiro had shown him. And he'd woken up this morning to find that his Dream-guarding affinity had risen out of abjection.

  He joined Vensha at the edge of the commune, and together they ran a few miles out of Beslin. Caen had naturally needed to use a boosted affinity to keep up. It was nice to be able to run again after the very calm time he'd spent at Parthra. The rush and feel of power from her passive augmentations were heady.

  They took a short break and ran another mile before needing to stop so that Caen could catch his breath.

  Air horns could only faintly be heard this far away from the Beslin train stop. Caen had brought out the weighted sword Vensha had forged for him. He intended to use a sword in the Patronage trials. The cumbersome weapon felt light in his grasp.

  After combat forms, Vensha cracked her neck. “I'll only use a spell when you force me to use one. You'll know when you succeed.”

  Before Caen could reply to that, she came at him. For the first time in his life, he easily tracked her movements without needing a spell. His mental processing was surreal.

  He met her sword for a brief instant before being pushed back. The flat side of her blade slapped his face, though she'd hardly put any force into it. He'd seen the blow coming but hadn't been able to move out of the way in time.

  Caen cast Body-quickening Basic Spell 2, and started poking for openings in her defence, of which there were none. Even unempowered, Vensha was able to rebuff his sharp jabs. Late Attuners like her were often very skilled at using their passive augmentations. It was a little terrifying.

  He cast another spell to give himself a boost in strength. She started moving a tad faster. Caen kept up. Yet, blocking her blows forced grunts out of him. From her soul structure, he could see that her Body-enhancement affinity was inactive. She wasn't casting any spells yet.

  She tried to smack his head with the flat of her blade. He weaved out of the way and smacked her across the shoulder instead. She grunted and darted at him, much faster than she'd moved so far. Body unempowered.

  Caen strained to keep up. He rebuffed her first few strikes, then reflexively focused Planar light through his speculon: a thin beam that couldn't so much as tear through paper.

  It blinded her left eye, yet Vensha moved into his personal space, ducked under his thrust, grabbed him by the face, and slammed him into the ground with enough force to knock the wind out of him.

  “Too much?” she asked with a look of worry.

  “Fine,” Caen wheezed out, giving her a thumbs up. He could see stars in his physical eyes, so his speculon was handling vision right now. That had hurt quite a bit, but her passive augmentations were helping him a great deal.

  “That Dream-guarding affinity of yours is probably better than what I have,” Vensha said. “You kept up well. Too well. What did you do to my eye? A spell?”

  “Planar light,” he forced out. He had no intentions of using it in the Patronage trials, but he'd been getting better at channeling and had reached for it in the heat of the moment. It was easier and faster than casting a spell.

  Vensha grunted. “Well, there's plenty of room for improvement. And you're going to have to do a lot of improving in a short span of time.”

  Caen nodded in understanding as he got up.

  “You'll be up against some incredibly skilled and highly motivated people in the trials,” she said, as she hefted her large sword onto her shoulders. “From today, I won't be going easy on you. I'll keep scaling in brutality whether or not you keep up.”

  “I expect nothing less,” he said, getting his breathing under control. “Again?”

  What followed was more rounds of being demolished by his aunt. Her body remained unempowered all through, but at least he made her work for it each time she slammed him into the ground. They went at this for hours, and she pointed out areas of weakness that he could work on.

  ***

  [Hey, when are you guys coming over?] Guinevere sent.

  [Just freshening up. We'll be there in a bit,] Caen said, changing into a set of new clothes, having already had a hot shower.

  [An hour, give or take,] Zeris sent.

  [Awesome! Can't wait to have you both over!]

  ***

  On the train to Drenlin, Caen could feel the press of… ‘presences’ all around him. It was the strangest sensation. He had a vague awareness of the people sitting around him. It felt to his instincts like a result of all his passive augmentations.

  Caen Mimicked Zeris Flora affinity. She didn't know any Flora spells, but, at this point, Caen was familiar enough with affinity clusters to locate it easily in her soul structure.

  Zeris had an affinity rating of 2.0111 in Flora magic, yet Caen’s affinity felt far stronger than hers. For one, the passive augmentations from his own affinity were notably more intense. He had an undeniably better feel for his clothes, the ropes wrapped around his torso, the vague feel of the surrounding vegetation that their train moved past, the sunlight filtering in through the windows.

  This was all the more apparent for spellcasting. Zeris's Flora affinity was, in some ways, comparable to that of the vine he'd used in Parthra. There was a strain to casting that was absent when he used his own affinity.

  She had a 2.8813 in Blood-healing and a 3.3034 in Dream-guarding. Caen's ratings of 1 were stronger than hers in both disciplines, as were his passive augmentations.

  Spirit-healing was the exception, though, as she had a much higher affinity and actually practiced that discipline. Still, his own Spirit-healing passive augmentations had benefits that hers didn't.

  “This is… this is just ridiculous,” she said to him in Code after he'd related everything to her.

  Caen nodded, still stunned. It didn't make sense that this much of a disparity existed between their affinities. It made him question the reliability of the Peilker Scale. What even were affinity ratings? And how did he fit within that system now?

  At Drenlin, Caen and Zeris took a rickshaw to the very edge of Westway. He deactivated Soul-sense and completely furled his existence for the first time in what felt like forever. The world seemed unusually quiet and underwhelming all around him without his soul structure bared to his senses.

  Guinevere had mentioned that her mother was an archmage, as was her father. Caen wanted to avoid doing anything that might draw their attention to him if he ran into them.

  Drenlin wasn't a walled city. It was divided into four major segments, and Caen had never had any reason to come down to Westway before. There were more patches of forest, large swathes of cultivated land, and stout farmsteads.

  Strangely enough, the hot Drenlin weather seemed to abate drastically the closer they came to their destination.

  It was a moderate estate with long bungalows and a cobblestone pathway. Guinevere's house sat at the center of it: a sprawling one-story building with a profuse amount of translucent glass for the walls and some parts of the roof. Caen found it curious that anyone would use so much glass for a building. At least in the Material Realm. He balked at how expensive it must have been.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Guinevere was standing outside the building, waving at them, when they arrived. They paid the rickshaw driver and walked over to her.

  “Welcome!” she said, spreading out her hands.

  “It’s really beautiful here, and the weather is very… pleasant,” Caen said. She hadn't been joking about her father tampering with the Drenlin climate. Even the earliest hours of morning weren't this cool.

  “Heh. You should see what it's like when my parents are jonesing for snow. Come on in, let me show you around.”

  The glass front door slid open on its own, and they followed Guinevere into a foyer with pristine white walls, a high ceiling, and dark wooden floor tiles.

  “First, my room,” Guinevere said, walking into a well-lit corridor. There were flowering plants and brambles hanging down from the ceiling in a manner reminiscent of Parthra.

  Guinevere opened the last pair of doors on the right. “What do you think?”

  It was a cozily furnished and very spacious room. The walls and ceiling were dark, and most of the furniture was a deep green. A fireplace on the left wall crackled quietly with smoldering logs. Beside it were a large black wooden table, a ceiling-high bookshelf, and a few comfortable-looking sofas.

  Swords of varying shapes and sizes hung on the right wall. There were dozens of them, some looking ornate and clearly enchanted, while others seemed mundane, if well-crafted.

  A large bed sat at the other end of the room, and on it was the biggest stuffed bear Caen had ever seen in his life. The thing was probably larger than Vensha. Its fur was golden, and it had a black eyepatch covering one eye. A… knife had been… taped to one of its arms.

  “What, by all the ancestors, is that?” Caen asked.

  Zeris burst out laughing. “That is Honey Cuddles.”

  “No,” Guinvere said. “He doesn't go by that name anymore. He's Mister Black Eyes.”

  “Isn't he the cutest?” Zeris said, walking over to the giant plush toy. Caen couldn't help but move to get a closer look at it.

  “He's not cute,” Guinevere said. “He's very fierce. See? He has an eye patch and a weapon, to boot.”

  “Why is he seven feet tall?” Caen asked.

  “My parents made him on the day I was born. They've been adding a few inches every year since.”

  “It's the way you say these things so casually that makes me respect you more,” Zeris said, chuckling.

  Guinevere snorted. “Come on, let me show you the viewing room. Oh, and also, where's your fragment?”

  Caen pulled up his sleeve to show it to her and gave a very summarized version of what it did as she took them back through the way they'd come and into another cozy room. There were several long couches facing a white wall. A spherical device with a crystalline shell hung from the ceiling. Guinevere said it would project a light display onto the wall when activated, and the walls were enchanted to produce sounds stored within the spherical device. These were rare even on Ser-gwu Island.

  She showed them an indoor garden with a glass ceiling and glowing butterflies fluttering all about. Next, they went into a cylindrical knitting room with all sorts of embroidered knick-knacks hanging from the wall. The needlework was so impressive that Caen took the time looking them over. It'd been months since he'd done any knitting.

  Guinevere's mother was in the living room, sitting elegantly on a rocking chair and knitting a multicolored scarf. She was a slender woman with dark blond hair.

  Caen felt as though his attention was claimed by her very presence. As though she was deserving of regard. Now that he'd started looking out for it, this was of a similar quality to what he'd felt with other mages like Fermien and the aged dryad that had overseen his bestowal rites in Parthra. There was an inexplicable grace to her, the movement of her hands as she knitted, the way she smiled at her daughter's entry and exchanged a warm greeting with Zeris.

  What is it with Astral mages and rocking chairs?

  “Mom, this is Caen,” Guinevere said.

  “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Hughes-Richardson.” It felt so wrong calling her that, but Guinevere had insisted that he do so. Caen had to keep himself from using ‘archmage’ or some other lofty honorific.

  “Oh, how polite,” her mother said. “Please, call me Joan.”

  Caen was not calling her that. But he gave her a strained smile.

  “My husband can be quite the bother, can't he?” Joan said.

  “Still weird,” Guinevere muttered under her breath.

  “Guin-guin, has your dad seen your friends?”

  “Mom, please, it's fine. We—”

  “ABRAHAM HUGHES-RICHARDSON!” Joan shouted, startling Caen and Zeris. Guinevere just shook her head.

  “WHAT IS IT THIS TIME, WOMAN?”

  “DON’T TAKE THAT TONE WITH ME!”

  They continued to bicker back and forth, and Guinevere gave her friends an apologetic look.

  [Don't they have the telepathic—]

  [It's… roleplaying,] Guinivere said, sounding miserable. [They like to act like an old bickering couple. Which I guess they are. Just wait it out.]

  “He's out back,” Joan said sweetly, hands still knitting.

  “Thanks, mom.”

  “Aww, don't mention it, love.”

  “By the Eye, your parents are so adorable!” Zeris squeaked when they'd left through a series of doors and smaller rooms, leading into a modest, well-maintained kitchen and out through a back door.

  “It gets old very fast,” Guinevere mumbled.

  A vast stretch of farmland lay before them with several long bungalows and barn houses littering the terrain.

  There were sections of woodland farther out and of tilled soil. A trio of horses was grazing out. Two of them had off-white coats and didn't seem unusual. The third horse, however, had a remarkably fluffy lilac coating with a white mane. A pair of magnificent wings was folded along its sides. This was a creature straight out of stories.

  “Pretty, isn't she?” Guinevere asked. “That’s Princess Evestia Jameson Frankfurt Seneca Snugguns, the 7th.”

  Caen chuckled at that, remembering someone he'd met with an equally lofty name. “She is pretty.”

  Some distance away from the horses, Farmer Brah’m was working by a barn with a pair of farmhands, shoveling hay. Caen blinked at the bizarre sight. This man was an archmage who could control the weather and various other elements. Why was he shovelling hay?

  Brah’m was laughing with one of the older men working with him. The straw hat on his head shaded his face and neatly trimmed salt and pepper beard. He looked at his daughter and her friends approaching and straightened, smiling. “Ah. Zeris! Welcome.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Hughes-Richardson,” Zeris said.

  “And what’s this? My favorite and most annoying customer? You dogged bastard. So you finally tracked me down to my own home!”

  “Oh my god,” Guinevere muttered.

  “Can I pet Evestia?” Zeris whispered to Guinevere.

  “Sure, she's harmless.”

  “Hello, Farmer Brah'm,” Caen said, walking towards the man. “Nice to see you again. Very wonderful weather around here.”

  “Well, you know how it fluctuates here in Westway,” the man said, leaning an elbow on his shovel. “Whims of the ancestors or what have you.”

  “Nice try, Farmer Brah'm.”

  “No idea what you're talking about, lad. So let's see this fragment of yours.”

  Caen blinked. He turned to Guinevere. [How does he—]

  [Archmage, Caen,] Guinevere sent. [Now you feel my pain.]

  Caen lifted his sleeve to reveal the fragment. He very carefully did not connect to it. Sh'kteiro had mentioned that Caen's aura behaved weirdly whenever he used Soul-sense. And while his uncle had explained that this wouldn't be eye-catching in an Attuner, Farmer Brah'm was not a Percipient. Ancestors alone knew what other senses he possessed.

  The fragment peeled off Caen’s arm instantly and shot towards Farmer Brah’m, coming to hover a foot away from his face. “Ah. Interesting find.”

  It morphed into different shapes quickly and even began to glow brightly with bioluminescence.

  Caen stared in shock. Controlling the fragments of others was said to be an incredibly difficult feat, even for dryads. Brah’m made it look effortless, however. Caen started to sweat. If Brah’m could sense his fragment and directly control it even faster than dryads could control theirs, then noticing that something was weird with Caen's aura didn't seem like too great a leap.

  “You must have really impressed that old bastard, huh?” Brah’m said. He stretched out his arm to the side, and Caen could see something large hurtling through the air from behind Brah'm at impossible speeds.

  It slammed into his outstretched hand with so much force that wind rippled out and ruffled Caen's clothes and hair violently, though the surrounding hay was undisturbed. A slender black-skinned serpent—whose scales bore a striking resemblance to some Parthran fragments he'd seen—slithered up Brah’m’s hand.

  “You have a fragment too,” Caen said, finally finding his voice.

  “Earned this ages ago,” Farmer Brah’m said as the… ‘snake’ slithered farther up his arm. It seemed so life-like, so real. It even had a forked-tongue slip out of its mouth a few times. “Yours is prettier, though.” His fragment hissed at him violently. Farmer Brah'm chuckled and patted its head.

  How was he making it do that?

  Farmer Brah'm laughed at the look on Caen's face and turned to examine the glowing fragment floating before him. “Here, let me show you how to properly feed this hungry thing.”