“Hi, Heron!” Yuriko said with a bright smile that made his heart rate nearly double and his hands clenched. Only when he heard the canvas stretch underneath his fingers did he start. His easel, paints, brushes, and palette were placed carefully across the low table and he had been preparing the canvas when she arrived.

“Yuri.” He coughed. His control over his Anima had never extended to thinning it out to make an effective perception aura, so he mostly kept it condensed against his body. He could feel her perceptive aura pressing against him though, and while it was thin enough to be practically invisible, it had a weight that would have been suffocating if he didn’t know it was from her. He could also feel another kind of influence affecting his mood, calming him down and easing his worries. And because of that, he easily regained his composure. “Uhm, are you ready?”

“Hmmm, let me change into my training gear,” she said and he nearly slapped himself. She just came back home, of course she wasn’t ready!

Yuriko headed towards the stairs and Heron half expected her to fly up there. Well, why wouldn’t she? It was so much more convenient. His Anima strength wasn’t even enough to push his bodyweight off the ground and he knew she had enough Animakinetic strength to rip a mountain in half. When she simply climbed the stairs, he chuckled to himself.

He also wondered how much she actually weighed now once she finished her Radiant Body Refinement. He heard her muttering about having spread her weight out across a wider surface when she moved, and there were a few times he noticed visible cracks on the cobblestones, rocks, or boulders, when she pushed hard to move fast. He would have to do the same once he reached the next stage, too.

He and Gwendith had been working hard to find a way to advance, but it suddenly got a lot easier just as the deadly battle happened. Things that he tried to use to increase his Animus capacity suddenly worked better, and other ideas popped in his mind, and when he iterated on them, he found out they worked even better than his original thought. He knew Gwendith experienced the same, and he also knew that she’d already found her path. He would have been envious if not for the fact that he found his, too. Well, he was here for that, and another thing.

A week or so after the battle, when he took up his painting hobby again, Heron noticed something. His Ennoia was of the Winds. Not just air and what it encompassed, but its movement, too. And, the thing was, air wasn’t the only movement he could sense.

The annoying part was that he couldn’t feel it, see it, or sense it in any way other than…well, painting.

The first time he painted a scene from memory, one of light pillars cracking and destroying the Veil, he had fallen into a trance. He hardly saw the canvas as he used his brush to bring the memory to life. Those pillars…they had frightened him so much that he had nightmares for days afterwards, and painting the scene had been his attempt to cope.

And when he broke out of his trance and looked, what was on the canvas was a nearly incoherent smear of colours. He first thought nothing of it. He painted while not even looking at his canvas so obviously it would be bad. Not that he threw them away though.

He continued painting every day. If he didn’t fall into a trance, they would turn out normal, but every time he did, every time he lost himself in the nightmares, the canvas would be smeared in different colours. Looking at them after a while, they actually didn’t look bad, in a strange, contemplative kind of way.

It was only when he painted the exact same scene in a trance did he realise that the smeared colours of two different paintings, done weeks apart, were completely identical. Of course, he did the same thing again the next day, with the same vision. He couldn’t activate the trance more than once a day, and when he tried to force it, he only got a piercing headache.

That painting turned out to be identical. He verified over the next week, and came up with nine identical paintings. Each glob of paint, even the ones that looked like the oils dribbled, were identical. It was definitely not a coincidence, though he wasn’t sure what it was.

He, er, was a bit too shy to just show the canvases off, or ask for help from the Knights in town. Besides, they were too busy with the reconstruction then. His father was similarly occupied, and besides, when he admitted to Balliol Muryh that he had severed his lineage, he had feared he’d get disowned. Instead, his father told him that though he was family, he would be cut off from their inherent duties.

It was those duties that had forced him to interact with the arrogant nobles back in his first year at the Academy. House Muryh was a distant branch house to House Esras, one of the Rumigan Dukes. It had coloured his next years and his duties during the war. It had been unpleasant, especially when those rotters were all panting after his goddess…

So it had actually given him relief instead of pain. But that also meant that he couldn’t approach the Academy teachers and scholars without feeling a bit of guilt. So his only choice was to show them to Yuriko or her Sorceress Mum, and well, Yuriko was far more approachable than the Luminous Sorceress.

So he brought one over during morning training at the school and had her look. She bit her lip while staring at the painting for a long while before asking to see the others. And when she looked at the nine canvases, she said, “They are completely identical, all the way down to each minute particle. Variations only come from the canvas itself. Interesting.”

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“I’ve others but these are the only ones that I made from the same image.”

She shook her head and said, “If they’re not identical to another painting, I’m not sure if I’ll find anything special with them. Even with these, other than the sameness, nothing else stands out.” She looked up at him, “Can you paint something for me now?”

“Ah, yes.” He did one of the views from the bridge. He managed to get into a trance, but the smear of colours wasn’t as thick.

“You’re certainly using a bit of your Intent, and your Ennoia energies,” Yuriko observed. “And those…hmmm, they kind of look like what I see when I use Chaos Sight, though not those exact colours.”

“Chaos Sight?” Heron muttered. “I don’t know the technique.”

“Can you do it again, while I manipulate ambient Chaos and Radiant energies?” Yuriko held up her palm and started to form a ball of Radiance.

“Ah, I can only do it once a day.”

“Hmm, tomorrow then.”

And that painting was illuminating. He focused on painting her hand and the orb, but what actually appeared was mostly the orb with her image burning under the colours. Well, it was mostly golds, yellows, and browns, with just a tinge of green.

“You can paint Ennoia energies,” she said wonderingly.

“I can?” Seeing an Ennoia that he hadn’t touched should have been impossible!

Her finger traced the whirling patterns and said, “Those are the flows of Radiance as I draw them from the ambient Chaos. Look, there’s even a Chaos mote in the process of igniting!”

“Oh.”

She grinned at him. “Do you know what that means?”

“Uhm, no?”

She rolled her eyes in such an enticing way that he missed the start of what she said, “...record the process of touching Ennoia! Among other things… Hmm, I wonder if it will help when I try to Transform Ennoia energies…”

“...How can I help?” Heron immediately said.

“Well, if you paint me while I meditate and train?”

“Oh, sure!”

“Tomorrow? Afternoon?”

“Alright!”

So there they were. Aside from that time with her Radiant orb and her hand, this would be the only time he got her as a live model rather than him painting from memory.

He was nervously setting up in the living room when Yuriko’s voice drifted down from upstairs. “Heron, I’m ready. Come on up!”

Heron’s mind came to a screeching halt, before restarting with a lurch. He squeaked, “Up there?”

“Yeah, come up to my room.”

“In…your…room?”

“Yes. This is where I meditate.”

“Ah…Ah! Wait, no!” He yelped. Much as he wanted to, Knight-Commander Virgil would kill him, not to mention her mum!

“Hmmm, why not? It’s either here or on the backyard porch. And there’s a blizzard out there.”

There was? He hadn’t noticed. E-either way, it wouldn’t be right. “Outside will do!”

“You sure? It’d be cold.”

“Yeah. Better training!”

“Oh, you’re right.”

A moment later, leapt down from the second floor and supported herself with her Animakinesis. Heron couldn’t help but stare. She was barefoot, only had a tank top on, and wore stretchy pants that only came down mid-calf. Her hair was also loose and it glimmered with inner Radiance.

“Let’s go then.”

“Ah, right…”

Through the kitchen, they passed by a red-haired woman with green eyes in a black and white dress. She bowed to Yuriko who nodded to her. Ryoko gazed at Heron appraisingly and he nodded back at her, but only received a sniff in return. Yuriko’s handmaiden had been the one to let him inside the house as the other Davar family members weren’t at home.

In the backyard, Heron was startled to see that he…couldn’t see much of anything except for a white flurry. The skies had been dark when he came here, but he didn’t expect this much snow. It was even worse than the storms back in Rumiga City.

Yuriko’s Anima flared out and pushed the flurries away. The pile of snow on the porch was less than an inch thick, but they immediately turned to steam. “I guess you can set up here?”

“Alright.” The porch’s roof gave a modicum of shelter. As for the cold…well, she was radiating warmth like a furnace now.

She waited while he set up. The easel’s legs had to be extended so that it would get to the correct height. He had it set for the low table earlier. His paint tubes went on the lounge chair and his brushes in the easel’s holder. He placed the canvas, grabbed the palette and squeezed paint dollops on it. He nodded to her when he was ready.

She hadn’t been facing him while he set up, and had been staring at the snowfall. She saw him, of course. The weight of her perceptive aura was still there. She pushed off against the platform’s edge and spun around while taking a seated meditation pose while hovering a pace above the frozen ground.

“I think I’ll work on controlling heat,” she declared. “Might make it easier with the blizzard. Uhm, begin after a few minutes?”

“Alright.”

She closed her eyes and her aura retracted. Her perceptive aura was still there, but the weight of it felt so minuscule that he could barely discern it from the snow and winds. Nothing seemed to happen for a while. Her hair fluttered to and fro, but it never actually covered her face. It glowed even brighter as the skies darkened even more.

After a while, Heron thought he could see the snow shifting differently from where the wind blew which he took as a sign to begin painting. The trance took him almost at once, and it seemed like he only blinked when it was done.

He stared at the painting. Her figure was clearly visible but it was mostly a silhouette painted in yellow. Her eyes, nose, and mouth were just darkened shades on her face. Golden streaks circled her body, but there were other nodes and fractals too.

A moment later, she noticed he stopped and moved around the easel to look. She pursed and lips and murmured, “Golden Silhouette…” Her eyes roved the differing fractals, patterns, and whatnot surrounding her figure, and she smiled. “Yes… this would be rather helpful.”

She smiled at him and then squeezed him into a hug. If it weren’t for the fact that his breath literally whooshed out of his lungs…

“You’re welcome,” he wheezed and Yuriko giggled happily.

They went back inside after packing up.

Yuriko asked, “How’s your progress with increasing your Animus reserves?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve found a way. I’m holding an extra three hundred lumens now.”

“How?”

“Uhm, I inked patterns on my skin. It’s holding the Animus and siphoning off my normal regeneration.”

“Oh, show me?”

“Uhm, it’s on my belly.”

“Oh. Uhm, I still need to see them anyway.”

He shrugged and put his things down before lifting his shirt up a bit. He made sure to clench his gut so that his abdominal muscles would appear and was gratified to see her cheeks redden.

“Looks good,” Yuriko grinned, “but you don’t have to hold it in.”

Heron chuckled awkwardly and pulled his shirt on. Was it warmer all of a sudden?