The kismets, unaware of those happenstances, soothed their battle-scars at the hospital wing. Mirai had suffered contusions to her stomach and chest when Ursus had pummeled her with a pillar, and Isaac was suffering from the aftershocks of his concussion. Out of them all, Elwin was in the worst shape, with 4 fractured ribs, a fractured skull, blunt trauma to his chest and belly, a dislocated right shoulder, and to top it all up, a sprained ankle and wrist. How Elwin mustered the courage to continue his fight against Ursus despite the pain baffled and impressed Professor Irina and her team of physicians, and they were all thankful of Angelo Giovanni whose artisanship produced the battle-uniform that protected him from fatal hurt.

Katherine visited all of them every day, bringing expensive sweets and treats from Aienwater purchased with her own coin, but all three recognized a distinct change about her driven by a reason they could never surmise. Each time she visited, Katherine spoke not a single word, and there grew persistent baggy shadows under her eyes throughout the two weeks that it took Isaac and Mirai to fully recover, as if she had not slept a single moment since. Elwin had more weeks to recover yet.

Finally, on the morning that Isaac and Mirai were to be discharged, Katherine came upon them both. Without a sentence or as much a warning she threw all of them into an embrace at once, and didn’t let go. When Isaac and Mirai had left Katherine hugged Elwin again, this time alone, tightly, and for a long, long time, which made Elwin both blush and wince in pain. But in that precious moment of closeness where Elwin felt the warmth of her robes and the fragrance of her head upon his shoulder, there came a slow, muted roil of sobs he could feel upon her chest, though no sound came from Katherine.

She parted her embrace and left as quickly as her legs could carry her; in her swirling hurricane-bun Elwin could see neither her eyes nor her expression.

But upon his bandaged shoulder lay droplets of hot tears.

* * *

Through the subsequent three weeks of recovery – or twenty-seven days in the calendar of the Republics – his classmates and those from other professors groups’ stopped by his room and gave him flowers and letters of encouragement, which by the second week had become a small hill upon his bedside table. Professor Aionia visited Elwin at regular frequency, but it was his kismets who visited him the most often, and out of them all, Mirai. Every afternoon she would march into Elwin’s lone hospital room with all of her day’s notes and scrawled diagrams and teach Elwin what he had missed while in recovery, taking the effort to go through the day’s lessons in meticulous step until the supper-bells rang.

“Today we wrapped up our experiments on antaricity. The roof nearly blew up when someone accidentally left their wires in the water-tank running for too long, and it’d split into hydroton and pyroton!”

“This morning we actually made our own lightbulbs using nothing other than burnt bamboo! Here, check this out.”

“Did you know the engineers at Heian are making a new type of locomotive that can run on antaricity?”

“Professor William’s apparently helped put all the cables underground. In the old photograms, cities looked really messy!”

Despite it only being a few weeks, the curriculum was advancing fast, and Elwin was enormously grateful for Mirai’s generous help. But nowhere in the curriculum was as interest-gripping as a particular tale: one of light and sound.

“Elwin, did you know that sounds can be impressed into light?” She exclaimed one day, bursting into the hospital wing.

“Huh?” He exclaimed.

“Sounds written in light? But those are two different things! How can sound – which exists in air – be written in something entirely different?”

“I thought so too, until Professor Aionia showed us how. We’ve just got to antaro-magnetism, and oh goodness it is beautiful...” she trailed off, unpacking her bag with several scrawled sketches.

“Here, take a look.”

On it was a stick figure of a person hollering into somewhere, numerous vertical lines that must’ve represented waves of sound, a strange contraption like a lightning rod, and a drawing of a wave, much like an ocean wave.

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“Elwin, what’s sound?”

“Energy carried through the air.”

“Right? And each person’s got a different voice, a different sound. Why could that be?”

“Haha, are you quizzing me on last week’s lesson?”

“Of course I am. Don’t tell me all our lessons were for nothing!” Mirai quipped, gently flicking Elwin’s bandaged ribs. They were almost fully healed, but still hurt a little.

“ACK! Not there! Yowch!”

Last fall, upon that skycraft, and in the Dining Hall with her poem-book, Mirai would have never teased him in such manner, and Elwin would have been far from comfortable with such a close distance. But now that they had fought as one in battle, and had defended one another and faced the prospect of life and death together, the veil that had separated them came undone, and they were comfortable and thankful for each other’s presence, as if a bowl that was broken had become whole again with a glue of gold.

“Now then, tell me what the two properties of sound are.”

“Ahem...” Elwin surmised, “Volume and pitch.”

“And those are?”

“Uhm,” Elwin leaned away, seeing yet another approaching finger.

“I got it! It’s... it was...”

“Yes?” Mirai asked, stopping an inch away.

“Amplitude and frequency.”

“Correct. Hmpf,” she said, pulling her hand away. Elwin wiped away the cornicles of sweat on his forehead. “Hoo, that was close.”

Mirai continued, “Well, it turns out that amplitude and frequency influence light, just as it does sound.”

“How? I mean light is just... light, things we can see, right?”

“That’s where I was tripped up. Professor Aionia said that the light that we see from other things, like the greenery of a leaf or the cool blue of an ocean is what’s called visible light.”

“Okay?”

“But there’s more than just visible light! There’s also pehenion, tahanion, vertonion, and armonion!”

“What?”

“You know when I speak in a low, ruuuumbling voice,” she elaborated, lowering her head, “I’m changing the pitch of the sound, aren’t I?”

“Yeah.”

“If you do the same thing with light, you get to change how light behaves. By increasing their pitch – well, frequency – you can turn visible light into pehenion light. Professor Aionia explained that pehenion rays from the Sun give us sunburns.”

“They aren’t visible to us? Those pehenion rays?”

“Nope. Our eyes can’t see them.”

“But how can something that we can’t see –” Elwin paused, remembering his training with Professor Aionia. He’d learned to perceive weaves of Ori which couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. But controlling those strands, and moving energy in specific ways, were how they performed the Four Mahamastra.

There was far more to the world than met his eye.

“Just because we can’t see something with our waking eyes doesn’t mean that it can’t exist, right? You can’t ‘see’ gravity for example, but you won’t jump off a cliff denying that it exists. We can still feel its effects,” explained Mirai, trying to convince him.

“You’re absolutely right,” Elwin answered. “So what about the other types of light? You mentioned tahanion light? Is it... related to fire?”

“Yeah!” Mirai chirped, enthusiasm bubbling from her voice. “Or more precisely, the heat we feel. According to Professor Aionia, it’s part of the light spectrum that dances with our body much more than others. Other light at extreme ends of the spectrum passes through our bodies, apparently, as if we were transparent.”

“Woah, that’s awesome! Even though they’re all forms of light, they act totally different because of a few small differences! What can you do with the others then? Like armonion light?”

“Oooh, you’re going to love this. I’ve been saving it until now. Are you ready?”

“My ears are all yours,” said Elwin, leaning in with care.

“Okay, so – Professor Aionia, twenty-five years ago, found that it is possible to record volume and pitch of sound into amplitude and frequency of light. They’re both waves, after all! And if you make a machine that is able to collect the sound of your voice, and turn it and stretch it into armonion light,” she continued, teetering, “you can send it anywhere you want, until someone with a similar contraption picks it up.”

“What happens then? When they pick it up?”

“The armonion light turns into sound again, and they can hear your voice from a hundred, even a thousand miles away.”

WHAT!?

What an incredible invention!

“So you can – you can talk with your friends several republics away as if they were next to you?”

“Yup!” beamed Mirai, smiling.

“And Professor Aionia was the one who found it out?”

“Yeah, and she showed us her machine which could transform armonion light into sound, and sound into armonion light. The machine’s about this big!” She exclaimed, stretching her two arms into the size of Elwin’s big luggage.

“Why did she never tell us? Until now?”

“She said it was a secret. I don’t really know why,” Mirai continued, “but when she had to answer the question, she looked a bit... how do I say... wistful? Nostalgic? She said she named it ‘armonion,’ because it meant harmony.”

“Oh, that’s cool. I wonder why she named it that way... hold on, speaking of which, how in the name of the MAHA did you generate lightning of all things at the Circuleum? Why’d you never tell us? It came from your Quan, right?”

“I’m keeping that a secret,” quipped Mirai, putting a finger upon her lips. “Until I’m better at it.”

And so Elwin went to sleep with many boggling questions on his mind, along with the tale of the intriguing ‘armonion’ light. The machine that Mirai described rang and spoke to him in numerous dreams after that night, as if it would be important to him; and in his imagination he saw Mirai bring lightning down from the sky like a MAHA of thunder.

Mirai’s passion for experimental philosophy matched Elwin’s, and the days seemed to fly by with her friendship. Before he knew it, his body had mended itself.