The following morning, he was awakened by his sleeping chambers’ security deactivating with the usual crunch. Saul rolled out of bed, splashed some water in his hair, slid into a breathable training outfit, and put on his death amulet.

He left his rooms and went around to Michah’s, passing through her sitting room and into the hall, catching her coming out of her sleeping chambers. She ignored him, walking past into her dressing room, pulling the door closed but leaving a crack.

“What?” She asked through the door.

“Dwarvish books are weird.”

“So are you.”

“So, I kind of got cheated with the new book, but it’s also perfect.”

“Ok, I’ll bite,” she said, “But you only have until I get changed.”

“You’re just putting on a training outfit,” he protested.

“Then you should talk faster.”

“Well, it's actually translated into three languages, so the actual book is only a third as big as…”

“And done,” Michah opened the door, wearing a similar outfit, “time’s up.”

She headed out of her rooms and toward the stairs to go to the training room, Saul at her side.

“So it’s only a third of the book, but it has four distinct parts—”

“You had your chance,” she talked over him, “Now, after you left for your beauty reading last night, we discussed concerns about politically motivated attempts to impede our interests in blacksalt dye…”

The pair were almost the first to reach the large exclusive training area below the tower, preceded only by their father who was the one who stepped down the internal security each morning. Uncle Nathan was the only person with a chance of beating him there, and they all knew to be suspicious if he ever put in the effort.

“Saul! Good discipline,” Joel called from the edge of the gritted wood practice square, “It’s good you didn’t stay up too late reading. Have you found your gifts satisfactory?”

“Yes,” Saul replied, “I have one new cantrip to begin developing immediately. May I stay for a short time after you bring the chamber up to pool quality to get a feel for it?”

His father considered for a moment, gently swaying side to side with his hands on his hips. From an Assassin with the dance icon, this was almost as threatening as a drawn blade. Saul started doing warm up stretches in the meantime.

“New cantrip?” Michah asked quietly.

“I did want to tell you,” Saul hissed back, kneeling to stretch his calves.

“No, too inefficient,” Joel decided, “you’ll be ensouled soon, you can use it then. It can be part of your normal cantrip practice for now. What’s the cantrip?”

“Fracture,” Saul moved on to wrist, elbow, and shoulder rotations and forced himself to be succinct, “dwarvish, known to the mirror and metal icons. Creates a temporary shard of sharp, reflective material. Once I learn to use it, it can be developed into a dagger-like shape with a safe grip.”

“Good, very good,” Joel said with raised eyebrows, “but my answer remains the same.”

Cherith, Junia, and Nathan joined them soon, the latter closing the door when he saw he was last. They waited for Saul to get warmed up before activating the room. Joel, Nathan, and Cherith had abilities that made warm ups unnecessary, Junia’s soul was advanced enough to keep her body limber, and Michah had a tissue hydration cantrip Saul had found for the water and blood icons, leaving Saul to go through the familiar set of stretches alone.

When he was ready, Joel inserted a simple icon fragment into the plinth in the center of the room. Within a minute, the environment of the room was raised to the upper range of mist quality. The older adults all relaxed slightly.

“If it’s already this unpleasant here at the peak of mortality,” Junia remarked, flexing slightly swollen muscles, “I can’t imagine how the Marchioness stayed here for over a year. They must have gone through hundreds of simple icons.”

“I’m told having the simple icon makes it a bit easier,” Joel said, as he followed his herculean wife to a sandy sparring ring.

After a moment’s consideration, Michah claimed Uncle Nathan.

“I want a better challenge today,” she explained.

Cherith was left with Saul.

“Long, short, or daggers?”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Dagger,” he sighed.

“Very well.”

She zipped to the shelf and back with a handful of slow steps that ate up the distance faster than a jog, handing over two sharp daggers. He tried to activate their harm reduction, but realized he hadn’t fed his tattoo. The training chamber might let it get some power eventually, but for the moment he had to ask Cherith to activate them like when he was a teenager. The five years between them didn’t feel as wide as they had when he was younger, but the two were still only slightly closer than the ensuing mock stabbing may have implied.

Cherith never inhibited her passive movement enhancing abilities, so the spar just amounted to each of them focusing on practicing technique, Saul stabbing at the air like doing a form, Cherith stabbing her brother like bruising a fruit.

After half an hour, everyone switched to individual powerplay, which for Saul was cantrip practice. The first portion was spent muttering “Heal,” the best death cantrip for bruises and superficial injuries. Then he started trying to use Fracture, muttering and waving through the air in front of his face in an attempt to fracture it. Even in the improved training environment, he wasn’t able to get a feel for the specific gesture and mental image that might be right for him yet.

Next he gave a few minutes to the two mirror cantrips that he had mastered, Mirror and Image, leaving his part of the room painted with reflective patches in various shapes and sizes and dotted with static illusions no larger than a foot on a side. He was working on controlling the shape of the mirrors he made with almost no physical motion, and minimizing the cupping motion needed to form an illusion. Using cantrips, especially successively, required all of his focus, so he completely tuned out the rest of the room. That monopolization of attention was why cantrips were all but worthless in an actual fight, except possibly as an opener.

Returning to attempting Fracture, Saul was able to watch his father and uncle dance-fighting. If one of his attempts pulled enough of his focus away that he lost track of the pair, he would know he was on the right track. That wasn’t likely to happen for a good couple of weeks though.

When the others had finished exercising each of their abilities and the chamber’s environment had noticeably weakened, Joel sent Saul and Junia out of the room. Saul’s incomplete soul would diminish an artificial pool environment relatively quickly to no benefit, and Junia had reached the top of pool in all her abilities two years ago or so, known as the pinnacle of mortal potential. She couldn’t truly grow further without a full set of immortal icons and immortal icon fragments, so the heightened training environment was wasted on her.

“You were working on a new cantrip,” his mother observed as they went upstairs, “you’re enjoying your new books?”

“I am!” Saul said, “I’ll probably end up with a couple new cantrips, but this one, Fracture, was basically a lucky coincidence.”

“Oh, how so?”

“It was included out of thoroughness by the author,” he explained, “dwarf writing is aggressively self-contained apparently, any outside detail mentioned has an accompanying note explaining it. Actually, it’s more than that. The book I got has a bunch of colons in the title, which turned out to be the closest translation of a form of dwarvish punctuation indicating a chain of works.

“It’s four short texts, really, building off of each other, but written by different authors. The first one is a dwarven magician’s foundational theory about cantrips. The text calls them ‘direct icon ontology’, which is the closest translation to the dwarvish word in Oriawin, which is really interesting. The next one is just called metal, and is about metal cantrips and the meanings of the icon as they pertain to the main theory. The last two are each building on the second text, from different authors. One is about using light cantrips with the metal icon, the other dark.”

“And where did the lucky coincidence with the mirror cantrip come in?” his mother asked patiently.

“Right, so it contains most of the background information you need,” Saul said, meandering back in the direction of the point, “but when something not from one of the earlier texts is mentioned, each author includes notes on the back of the page providing an explanation. A couple pages even have a longer back than front.

“The text on light and metal is the one where I got lucky. The author explains that they decided to write it because of a cantrip they learned about that was common to the metal and mirror icons, and how the mirror icon is known to use many light and some dark cantrips. They apparently hoped that metal would be close enough to mirror to also be able to cast some light cantrips, and had limited success. I think someone with the metal icon would be mostly disappointed, but I should be able to get several new cantrips for the mirror icon.”

“And the Fracture cantrip was the inspiration?”

“Exactly! I mostly read the part about broader cantrip theory, but when I glanced through the rest, it jumped out at me.”

“Does the section about the metal icon have a list of dwarvish cantrips?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“You’ll be able to use them with the element icon then,” Junia said, “unless there’s some further nuance. I’d imagine a book from dwarves would address it? I seem to recall a certain young man telling me that dwarves have an element affinity, when he was complaining about being human.”

“Mom, I was a teenager,” Saul defended himself.

“A seventeen-ager,” she countered, “But I suppose you did change your mind. What was it you started saying after that?”

“That I wish I was an elf,” he admitted, “They have an affinity for everything, total bullshit.”

His mother gave him a stern look.

“Sorry, hogwash,” Saul said, then held up his right wrist, “My interest in elvish culture worked out though.”

She nodded as they came to a stop in front of the door to his parents’ rooms.

“What’s on your schedule for today?”

Saul pulled it out and read, “I’m meeting with the steward about the peonage applicant, going to the temple, asking about the mirror and element soul idol while I’m there, probably meeting with the applicant in the late afternoon, then…reading? Unless something comes up. What about you?”

“I need to kill a giant. Getting the body back to the city will probably take most of the day.”

“Ouch. That big? No way to cut it into small enough parts to fit in a storage bag?”

“Joel is taking care of a duty in about the opposite direction, so no,” she said, opening the door to her sitting room. His mother’s weapon was a hammer, so she usually let her husband do the sword-work.

“Pull it down the coast?”

“Go get washed and ready for the day, dear, I’ll see you this evening.”

“Alright Mom, go knock it dead,” Saul gave her a quick hug.