“Thank you all for allowing me to take up some of your time,” Priest Dior told the group once the children were gone. “Should you pass back through the village at some point and need anything, don’t hesitate to ask. The vegetables you asked for have been delivered to your carriage.”

It was nearing noon as they left the church and headed back through the fields to the village.

“Exactly how accurately can your mom see the future?” Saul asked Natalie after a few minutes.

“It varies,” she said, “if she spends enough time and effort she can make reliable predictions pretty far out, but usually it’s just a sense of what general advice is best. Why?”

“She said something to me about children asking uncomfortable questions, and one of the kids in the church asked me darn near the exact thing she posited.”

“Oh, something about describing the shape of your genitals?”

Saul paused for a moment, “that’s it. You heard that part?”

“No, she just uses that analogy to rebuke people who ask personal questions about elves. That kid must have been approaching puberty.”

“None of them looked old enough to be a preteen.”

“Many of them were out of their teens,” Natalie corrected. “I shouldn’t say too much, but just double how old you think an elf is and you’ll probably be close.”

“Alma told me that they get icons when they turn thirty. If that’s true, they’d only be the equivalent of fifteen, not twenty.”

“That would be something to ask the priest about. I don’t study animurgy much.”

When they reached the village, it was much quieter than it had been that morning. Most of the people they saw were sitting in front of their homes doing work with their hands. Dinah packed up the cots they had slept on while Saul unfolded the portable hole so that Ziba and Bart could replace the empty water barrels with the ones Ziba had filled on the carriage yesterday. Before they took the empty barrels to fill, Saul handed his storage satchel to Ziba long enough to climb into the hole and retrieve a couple books. Within the hour, they set out once more.

By the time the carriage stopped for the night, Saul had finished his text about artifact creation and use. The final section had snippets of records from the scant few artificers who had released their abilities for distribution. The techniques and abilities discussed in the book were considered basic, many artificers passing their knowledge only to children or apprentices. Several of the abilities recorded were from the simple icon, and Saul was debating asking the faerie to help him get one or two related to artifact attunement. Alternatively, he could give Bart a few appropriate fragments and try to get him the abilities. Then Saul could copy or steal the powers when he needed them.

There was one other oddity he had noticed when reading, which he asked Natalie about the next day.

“So, you’ve read about artifice before, right?”

“Not as much as thaumaturgy,” she replied, “but yes.”

“According to the book I read, the basic principle of artifice is imbuing one or more abilities from an icon into an object so that they can be used by anyone ensouled or with the same icon. Abilities from more than one icon are prohibitively difficult to imbue, making abilities from a person’s soul idol itself virtually impossible to incorporate.”

“Correct? Is that a question or statement?”

“Well, it’s just that I’ve seen someone use an artifact that incorporated another person’s domain,” Saul explained.

“Was that other person an artificer themselves? It’s uncommon, but there are artificers who seem to freely incorporate their own abilities into artifacts.”

“I may have seen something like that, now that you say it, but no.”

“That would leave three likely possibilities,” Natalie said. “The artifact was made by a grandmaster of artifice with immortal power and experience, it was made using a highly specific technique that isn’t widely known, or the artifact had limitations that narrowed its use more than a conventional artifact.”

“Actually, I could see it being the third one. I didn’t ask many questions, not realizing that the item was unusual, but the use did seem limited.”

“Oh? How did it work? From what you observed.”

Saul considered how much to say for a moment, “I think it might have required the person who’s domain it was imitating to actively use their domain nearby.”

“That’s plausible. Only able to activate in the presence of the imbued domain. It loses some of the biggest advantages of using artifacts, but if you need two of the same domain for some reason, it would be perfect. It could still be a specialized technique as well.”

“Right. Before I start my next book, you said something about having advice for using Light the other day?”

Natalie walked him through some of her experience with using the information about the Incandesce cantrip that Nadine gave out to develop other light cantrips quickly. The visualization that was the centerpiece had been developed and layered with meaning so thoroughly that slight adjustments could produce completely different cantrips as long as the change made sense to the user. The simplest description of the Incandesce image was of sunlight warming and illuminating an object, focused by a glass lens.

Saul removed the lens and object to create a simple ‘Light’. Unlike the cantrip the elves had used, this took the form of a point of light hovering above the palm of his hand.

“You got that in fifteen fucking minutes!” Toby swore with partially feigned exasperation.

“Still no luck with Breath?” Saul asked rhetorically, “just keep trying, you’ll get a feel for it. It should start getting easier now that we’re further north.”

He tried to get a second cantrip in the same day, if only to see the look on Toby’s face, but Dark didn’t come so easily. Saul’s idea was to remove the object from the Incandesce visual and turn the lens opaque to create an area of shadow within the light, but it was a complete departure from the visualization’s origin and didn’t immediately work.

A couple days later, the bumps of the road had been joined by slight inclines and declines as the terrain became more hilly. The next person to get the cantrip they had been practicing to work was actually Bart, who finally learned the death version of Chill. The motion that worked for him was scratching his head. Saul managed to get Dark to work the day after, plunging the sitting area into a dim haze; the glass lights were able to partially push through his cantrip.

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Saul, followed by Natalie and Bart, went up to the roof to try the cantrip more. The patches of darkness were swiftly left behind, but he was able to see how large they were more easily.

“Why do you keep making them relative to the landscape?” Natalie asked eventually. “Connect the area to yourself like Light and it won’t get left behind to confuse the local bird population for a few minutes.”

“To me, a patch of darkness is more useful stationary,” Saul replied. “Even at night, an area of black moving around will draw the eye.”

“Hmm. I’ve used Cloak to sneak around once or twice and no one’s noticed me. Elves have better night vision than humans.”

“Can I see?”

“No, it doesn’t work in daylight,” she said.

“So it isn’t creating darkness, it’s manipulating it. You aren’t making a cloak of perfect darkness, you're wrapping the existing darkness around yourself. There’s probably some amount of light in it.”

“That could be how it works. Have you studied the dark and light icons especially?”

“I have,” Saul agreed, “in fact, my father has the dark icon. He taught me about his stealth abilities and how they manipulate the existing environment rather than adding or subtracting elements.”

“What’s his combination?”

“A dance of darkness and death, Assassin.”

“Ooh, poetic,” Natalie draped her arms across the low railing. “Does he have a title? Like your uncle?”

“No, that’s not really a…thing. A year or two after getting passed over to become the next Viscount, Uncle Nathan christened himself the ‘Midsummer Fool.’ To be fair, he has done some impressive things. From time to time another young noble will try to give themselves a name like that, but he’s still the only one who’s managed to pull it off.”

“My lord!” Bart interrupted suddenly, “someone’s blocking the road.”

Saul turned and rose to his knees, squinting ahead. There was someone in the middle of the road atop the next rise in the road, but he couldn’t make them out well.

“They’re armed,” Natalie offered, eyes closed. “Fully awakened, upper range of mist.”

Pulling open the hatch, Saul called for Toby.

“Get down, Saul,” Toby said as he joined them on the roof. A single-edged sword appeared in his right hand and a dagger in his left. He handed the dagger to Bart.

After a tense few minutes, they rolled to a stop in front of the elf. They called out something only Natalie could understand. She crossed the roof toward the ladder, but Toby stopped her.

“Stay up here,” he told her, “we don’t know if he’s hostile, no matter what he just said.”

“If he tries to attack me, I’ll be gone before he can lift a finger,” she countered.

“Will you? You aren’t trained in close quarters combat, and have no interest in learning. You don’t know how fast a situation can change, and you don’t want to be within arm’s reach when it does.”

Natalie relented with a scowl, stepping to the front of the roof to call something back. Saul dug his translation artifact out of his satchel and put it on. The two weren’t slowing their discussion down at all so he barely got anything, but the elf in the road was saying something about a blight, which wasn’t a great sign. After a few minutes she turned back to the rest of them.

“They’re one of the next village’s rangers,” Natalie explained. “The village is sick. They decided to stop anyone from entering or leaving.”

“If it’s an elvish disease, would it affect us?” Saul asked.

“I don’t know. The question is, do we try to learn more or turn back to find another way.”

“The last split in the road was three days ago!” Dinah called up from the front of the carriage.

“It would add at least a week to our trip to try to go around,” Saul said. “If there’s a chance we can pass through without risk, I’d like to learn more. We could offer to bring word of the disease to the next couple villages we pass through, that might make them more willing to let us pass.”

“It’s your call, but if that’s what you want, we should learn as much from this guy as possible before getting any closer to him,” Toby advised, “much less the rest of the village.”

“Elves aren’t ‘guys,’ Toby,” Natalie corrected.

“A guy can be a man or a woman, I don’t see why it couldn’t be an elf.”

“Excuse me,” Bart put in, “when we approached the ranger, I started tasting something unusual with my ability. It’s sort of slimy and porous.”

“You can sense disease?” Natalie asked.

“It’s a taste-based area awareness perception ability,” Saul explained.

“I can see disease, and he looks fine to me,” Toby said.

“I’m fine with talking to them from up here, if you can keep translating Natalie?”

It took what felt like an hour’s worth of shouting questions back and forth with Natalie translating to get the most complete picture the ranger in front of them, Blaise, knew. Saul took notes.

Every adult in the entire village had gotten sick. Some just had dark patches, while others had progressed to deformations on their bodies, and a few had died outright, their flesh dissolving off their skeletons. At first, none of the rangers were affected. One of them had noticed that there was a glimmering black ooze in the well, and they had tried to get the town to stop drinking from it, but the people who were already sick started to rapidly worsen without well water. Even though the rangers themselves were all now drinking from a nearby stream, two of them had recently developed the symptoms as well.

“I’m leaning toward turning back after all,” Saul said once they had gotten everything they could from the ranger. “Unless you know what this is Natalie? Or can you divine if this is a risk for us?”

“I can try, but I’m a lot more limited than my mother,” Natalie replied. “I’m all but incapable of using divination on anyone but myself.”

She sat down and closed her eyes.

“My lord,” Ziba spoke hesitantly from the roof supplies, “we don’t have enough water to go around. We could refill from the stream they mentioned, but we would be downstream from the village if there is some toxin originating there.”

“…I see.” Saul frowned. “We could possibly go around in a more direct way, but it would tire the horse. We would have to stop a few miles on the other side of the village for at least a day.”

“Do any of us have a way to make water?” Toby asked. “A cantrip or ability?”

“Bart has the fish icon. I honestly don’t know if it can learn the basic Water cantrip. If I had a mist water ring, I could feed it to my tattoo and attempt the cantrip, but I would have minutes or less to make it work.”

“These rangers might have some. Do elves use condensation pits?”

“I assume they have something along those lines,” Saul agreed, “they had too many people with icons in the last village to fit with natural condensation rates.”

They looked at the ranger in the road, then down at Natalie, the only one who could properly communicate.

Eventually, she got to her feet and explained, “I was able to tweak my predictions far enough to include Saul and Toby, but not the other three of you. The best I can say is that I don’t think us three are in danger from this, but not knowing what it is makes that judgment tenuous. I’m in favor of going around the village more directly like Saul suggested. If we have to wait a day, I can try to learn more. If this is likely to become a widespread issue, I can try to get word to my mother.”

“Can you make water?” Toby prompted.

“Not right now. I have an ability that could let me do that, but it’s inconsistent. I can work on getting something with water creation over the next few days.”

“Right, you had a random elemental power meta-ability,” Saul commented, having checked a note in his schedule. “What does it do right now?”

“Wind manipulation,” she replied. “If we’re in agreement, I’ll tell Blaise our plan.”

After further translated discussion, the ranger was happy for them to essentially make a second road that went around the town. This was an ability that the horse had been chosen for, allowing the carriage to cross even a swamp or collapsed bridge, though Geronimo Tanny would be completely exhausted by using it to go all the way around the village. Blaise got another older ranger who quickly decided on the best route and guided them off the road.