Kyber found that he was of two minds regarding the outsiders.

It was rare, these days, for that to happen. Multi-headed draconids tended to grow out of such disagreements in their adolescence. Though his two minds were connected at the soul, certain habits could still cause mild divergence. His Right was more comfortable speaking to unfamiliar people and making eye contact, for example, tasks that neither particularly enjoyed or felt well-suited for.

But a difference of opinion had happened. His Left had remained deeply skeptical of the outsiders and their claims. Their draconid had seemed almost… not awakened. The powers that one exhibited were almost certainly generated by an artifact, yet did not seem to be produced by the obvious curse-aspected artifact he carried. His Left even suspected that they might not be sorcerer aspirants at all. The two who were clearly awakened didn’t have particularly impressive control over their awakened abilities. They were like enormous children. Powerful, but horrifically unskilled. They didn’t seem capable of weaving or forging essence at all, much less approaching the skill necessary to complete a sorcerous initiation. Either they hadn’t been awakened long at all, or humans suffered enormous setbacks with control, even after somehow overcoming their barrier to awakening.

And yet… His Right had conversed with them, answered their questions, watched them fight. They acted as if the strange towers were something familiar to them. They had had enough understanding of the nature of the protections to find a way into the towers for Kyber and Alco, who the towers were clearly warded against. They had a whole list of things that their strange encounter with the enchanted column could have been. They had jargon, he was pretty certain, despite his tenuous familiarity with English. They had not rushed forward, and had even seen the trigger on the column. There was a professional sort of methodology, and a casualness that he suspected was born from experience. The human female didn’t seem to display these, and seemed as interested as he was in watching the other two work. A trainee, perhaps?

And then there were the math questions. He hadn’t touched on his awakened abilities at the time, for fear of invalidating whatever test they were conducting, but even without such assistance Kyber had always had a talent for mathematics. For them to be able to just casually incorporate mathematics that he had never heard of before into their test, it seemed to indicate that this level of knowledge wasn’t anything special where they came from.

He had gone over the concept, exponent, and found that it did seem to be sensible to treat as its own operation, rather than merely a common occurrence of repeated factors in many formulations of natural law. He had gone through a sizable set of pairs of factor and number of repetitions, letting his awakened ability assist him as the results began to become surprisingly large. So large that he not only couldn’t hold the numbers in his head without flexing his power, but also did not even know how to properly name them - he could only describe them in words. Millions of millions of millions.

What’s more, he had started to see the shape of a curve as he imagined the values. Could there be a fractional exponent? What would that even mean? With a heavier draw on his power than he was used to, he found that the answer was, to his surprise, yes. What did that even mean to have a one and a half factors of two? He was sure that he would reason it out in time, now that he had noticed that it was somehow possible.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Even more surprising were the numbers which resulted from fractional exponents. They weren’t representable. It wasn’t a problem of them being too large to reasonably write down, as some of the results of using larger exponents were. It was that there was no representation at all. No ratio would correctly and accurately represent the value. Previously, this was something he had only ever encountered in the circular constant, but here was a whole class of such numbers.

With easy access to unimaginably massive numbers, numbers which have no representation, and the increased essence strain from calculating fractional exponents, he now had three new avenues to exercise his essence. All from one little bit of information, mentioned so casually. There was surely more where that came from.

While he was a draconid, and correspondingly he had a large essence pool and growth potential, one still had to actually struggle and strive in order to reach that potential. His power, even using it all day to project the movements of everyone and everything he could see, was such a minor strain these days that he hardly grew at all. Others had begun to whisper that he was crippled. That was about to change.

“Kyber, of the brood of Ix!” the attendant called into the council common room, which was conspicuously missing its large, central crystal table. Perhaps the rumors of a magical clash here were true. Having seen the male human’s power at work, missing objects certainly made sense. Kyber stood, and began to move toward the passage to the private council chambers, where the interviews were taking place.

He was slightly displeased by the use of English, but it was probably inevitable that he would need to finish learning it at this point. If the full council approved the arrangement with the outsiders, English would become the primary language for the town. It might happen anyway. After all, the only reason it was not already so was that the great sorceress who founded and funded the expedition to settle this town knew only that the language we would need to speak was one within a set of possibilities.

Erien Alco stepped out of the hallway to the private rooms, wearing a smug smile, as Kyber was still making his way to the back of the common room. Kyber knew that Alco had spoken ill of the outsiders to the council. He knew because Alco had spoken ill of them to him when they had both been waiting to be called. He was prideful, and having his marksmanship treated as a waste of ammunition would no doubt color his experience.

The discord evaporated as they passed one another, exchanging a nod. As he stood at the threshold, his two states of mind were reconciled at last. He still thought that the outsiders were likely not sorcerer aspirants. He thought that they were probably up to something, potentially something nefarious. But those outsiders… no, those aliens, those beings from someplace so foreign and so other that he couldn’t even begin to imagine, they held secrets. So many that they leaked like a sieve. Their speech, their actions, everything they did could reveal knowledge that he could not get anywhere else, not even from the exalted texts of sorcery they had brought with them from wherever it was their people had come from. He had already gotten enough from one day with them that he was confident that he’d be able to start catching up to his awakened peers in strength. How much more could he gain by following them?

Kyber stood before the council, and delivered his most biased accounting of his trip with the outsiders. For the good of the settlement? To fulfill their long prophesied purpose? No, so that he may grow to greater heights.