I looked at Rex across the cookfire. Already dressed, his hair neatly arranged, with his bowl in both hands, now nearly empty.
Now that I was observing him, I saw he was not even focused on the food he was eating, just making mechanical motions with his hands while his eyes were focused on the pyramid with more attention than I had previously noticed.
I knew Rex had always been looking at the pyramid, but I had attributed it to the same fascination all of us felt; I was less certain of that now.
"Rex," I said, and he looked at me, and I noticed how the movement of his head was just the right amount calculated to be pleasant, and not one inch more... What did that remind me of?
"Voss," he replied, stating my name.
"The pyramid," I said, and I smiled. "I have seen you watch it every morning."
"It is the reason we are here," he said.
"What do you see when you look at it?" I asked.
He paused, and it was not a long or short pause, and I noted that the length of time seemed precisely calculated as if he had anticipated questions like these and practiced how he would answer them.
Then something moved behind his expression, less controlled than calculation, there and gone before I could name it.
"The same thing you see," he said, and he went back to his porridge.
Not knowing what to read in that interaction, I went back to mine and thought about the two different qualities of pause and what the difference between them might mean, and I added a fifth objective to the notebook.
Find out where Rex goes.
[Observation 26 → 27 (Initiate)]
The notification arrived as I set my bowl down, and I acknowledged it and stood.
"South face," I said to Bari and Dara. "Cartography. Before the researchers."
Bari stood, his sock catching on the crate, the hole presumably larger, before he put on his boots. Dara collected her satchel without comment. They were both eager to measure the earth, and I left them to it, walking a few meters away from them.
At the south markers, I positioned myself at twenty meters from where the crack would open and raised my staff and began my practice casts.
The first Spark left my staff, and I noticed immediately that something had changed.
Not in the spell, the change was in the casting of it. The channel opened cleanly, without the fractional resistance I had always felt at the beginning of a practice session; there was always that brief moment of the grip finding itself, the mental effort of the first cast slightly larger than all the ones that followed, and now that moment was gone.
The first cast was as clean as the tenth, the grip already present rather than being established. Concentration and a higher Anima Depth are already creating wonders.
I cast again and again.
The sequential casts did not degrade. In previous loops, by the seventh or eighth cast in a sustained sequence, I could feel the Concentration fraying at the edges, as the mental grip on each subsequent channel was slightly less precise than the one before, which was why my later hits in a sequence were less accurate than my early ones.
That thinning was absent. Each cast arrived with the same quality as the first, the grip holding steady across the sequence without requiring any of the conscious maintenance it had always demanded before.
I was aware that my action was drawing eyes and curiosity from my friends, but I did not care to explain myself, knowing that it might just be ultimately futile, and I did not have much time.
I ran thirty casts, and the thirtieth was as clean as the first.
[Spark 19 → 21 (Initiate)]
Two ranks from sustained deliberate practice, and the quality of both new ranks was different from how ranks had felt before, not just the mechanical improvement of a higher number but something in the way the improvement landed, cleaner and more stable, as though Concentration at Acolyte tier was not just holding the cast but refining it in the holding.
I paused my casting and tested the Threadwork lattice next, building it in the air ahead of me without a target, taking it to the third corner, and holding it there and pushing more load into it than I normally would during practice, and the corner held.
A smile touched the corner of my lips as I added more load to the lattice. It held.
Okay, how far can I push it? Not wasting time, I continued to do so until I pushed the structure to the edge of what my Anima Depth could sustain at this distance from the eruption, and it held there, trembling slightly but intact, and I released it slowly.
Previously, I would never dare to practice in this manner, because failure could lead to madness as pure Anima fused with broken lattices could tear through the channels like razor blades, and this was one of the best ways to kill your talent as a mage, but in comparison to dying, there was no more fear in my heart.
[Threadwork 39 — 40 (Acolyte)]
Bari had stopped measuring and was watching me.
"You are doing something different," he said.
"Practicing," I said.
"Elric, you are always practicing," he said, and he frowned. "This looks different from practicing."
I considered how to answer that and decided the honest version was the most useful one.
"Something changed overnight," I said. "My Concentration crossed a threshold. I am finding out what that means."
He looked at my staff. At the lattice that was no longer visible, and then at me.
"And?" he said.
"It means I can hold things," I said. "Without them slipping."
He nodded with the equanimity of someone who had decided that Elric doing unusual things with magic was simply a feature of knowing Elric and went back to his measuring line.
"Don’t push yourself too much, Elric. We still have eight more years of being Acolytes ahead of us, and slow and steady is always the way to go."
I smiled and nodded, and I glanced to the side at Dara, who had watched our interactions and said nothing, but I felt her attention shift and knew she had filed it, and she would undoubtedly talk to me about it when we were alone.
I paused at this thought... then I sighed and looked away.