Sara’s haste in working to get everything she could done turns out to have a cost, or maybe it’s the length of the session we just completed. The main downside turns out to be something like the aftermath of cramps; I say something like cramps, because there’s no actual physical muscle cramping. It just hurts unbelievably much, in that sore-muscles way, in muscles that don’t exist in the physical world and therefore can’t be soothed by Amber’s healing magic.
I… endure, I suppose. With my best attempt at a calm, stoic demeanor at first, which mostly is a quiet grimace as I try to get my limbs moving and fail, but everyone can tell that something is wrong—the inability to do more than vaguely flop around like a seventy-kilo fish that’s been landed onto the couch is a pretty big hint—and Amber coaxes the problem out of me. It takes her a while, which makes me mutter darkly about her presumption, her correct presumption, that my prior partners had mostly been profoundly unsympathetic towards anything that didn’t leave me incapable of doing my duties, and even so she keeps having to prompt me about whether things are improving.
They do improve. It’s a couple hundred seconds before I can get my muscles to start working in any manner even approaching properly, and even then I very much don’t want to be standing up for risk of falling, but the pain does ease. In the meantime, I mostly shoo Amber off to go do something, anything other than fretting over me; it’s nice and all but it feels a little smothering and dishonest, which is ridiculous given that it’s Amber, but so it goes. She drifts off into the kitchen, distracting herself by cooking with Vonne, while Sara and Zidanya have a quiet conversation nearby that I both try my best not to listen to and try my hardest to overhear at the same time.
“—do not disagree on your accord. Obviously. That would be idiotic.”
“Think you she would balk, even—”
“—will not be put in such a position. If there is no continuity witness—”
It’s the frustration of having a conversation just on the other side of audible that makes me eventually resort to pulling out the Visor for distraction, more than the shame of trying to eavesdrop. Sara had cautioned me against using it this evening, but I’m bored; the novelty of having nothing trying to kill me has worn off, and I’m used to having all sorts of distractions around. Puzzles, challenges, problems, people, media, work, all of these are available in volumes far beyond anyone’s capacity to run out of in the Fleet, and I’ve got a new, interesting example sitting, tantalizing, around my ear.
It’s less painful than it is dizzying. Well, okay, it’s pretty painful. After the initial spike of pain and the nosebleed, it dies down to a dull throbbing that doesn’t get much worse with use of the Visor, and which does respond to Amber’s healing. She’s so busy laughing at the absolute predictability of my having done exactly what Sara told me not to do out of boredom and curiosity to really chide me for it, which I appreciate, and she sits with me for a bit as she channels some sort of more abstract divine thing to help me grow into my new connections to Conjure Visor and to the Earring.
Trying to use the Visor to see what she’s doing works, but it’s incredibly distracting. There’s just… so very much to see, and my mind flits from new revelation to new revelation. I use Manipulate Mana to create whorls and patterns in the ambient flows of the room, and I see every tiny chaotic permutation of what’s so obviously a metaphysical equivalent to fluid dynamics. I can—I can get wildly distracted, is what I can do, and I turn back to Amber, and get another shock.
I had expected to see the usual mathematical representations of mana flows and maybe some sort of arbitrary expression of Skill usage as translated through the connections I’ve managed to make use of between my Visor and my Omniglot Skill, which I’ve used to good effect to get readable names for most things. Instead, I get the representations of mana flows, though so much more granular that I have to make a bunch of modifications to get some smoothing functions in and display it with less precision, and I get something else.
Well, a lot of somethings else.
“What’s the—hey, I just realized.” I interrupt myself, blinking in thought. “I basically never hear anyone say what their Skills are. Especially not the passives. Is there some kind of social taboo? Why are we planning to fight without actually knowing what each other’s capabilities are, really? I mean, obviously Zidanya has how many centuries of things I have no idea about, and I hardly know you, and Sara… wait. Am I offending by telling people mine, or if I ask you what Skill you’re using right now?”
“Adam.” Amber’s face twists in some expression or another. “I had… I had not realized you were not aware.”
“Yeah, yet another case of Adam being clueless.” This is apparently taking her a moment, which is about as long as it takes me to crack defensively wise to cover my feeling of inadequacy. “Can you enlighten me already?”
“I… had thought that… well.” Amber blushes, for some reason, shaking her head. “Regardless! Yes. I… yes. Where even to begin?”
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“Usually I think you can’t go too far wrong with—”
“—starting at the beginning?”
“Oh, endless airless expanse, no. You’re definitely not a Bard.” I grin at her, and it seems to break her out of whatever embarrassment had affected her. “You start at some sort of narratively significant pivotal moment, maybe a quarter of the way in, maybe a third. Then you sort of barge on forwards, trying to figure out a way to fill in the details that are in your wake as you go. Eventually, you get to a point where you’ve accumulated so many questions that there’s no cognitive space to ingest new ones, and then you take a step back and answer enough of them that you can start accumulating new ones.”
“I… hear you, my lord.” It’s a commendable attempt at dryness, undermined by her giggling.
“Excellent. As I have dispensed my ineffable wisdom, I await your explanation.”
Her giggles become snickers, and she pulls me into an embrace. The kiss starts out gentle, almost tentative, but my hands wrap around her hair and deepen and lengthen it into something that leaves us both flushed and a little out of breath. I settle into her, body pressed up against her side with her arm around my shoulder, and try to give off the impression of listening intently.
“The soul is, almost by definition, a deeply private and personal matter. It is the ultimate source of the Self; mar the body as you will, healing will restore it, excepting only the extent to which the soul has been itself marred. This is much of why a Soul Mage is such a terrifying matter, and it is why we rarely speak of our most fundamental Selves to each other.
“To know someone’s soul is to have power over them. Names have power when wielded alone, especially if one wields them through one of the magical traditions which specialize in this; but far more powerful than merely a name, even in its fullest expression, is to know more. A…” I glance at her as her voice falters, noticing the blush on her skin, and wait patiently. “A woman’s name and Skills, her origin, where she dwelt, her Natures and Deeds and Glories; these are the woman, and there is… I cannot believe this.” Her voice is acerbic and sulky at the same time, a mutter that seems almost like it’s not directed at me at all. “I am not a child. I will not pout over what I thought was a grandly romantic gesture from you turning out to have been a combination of your ignorance and pragmatism!”
“Wait, did I—”
“Were you the slightest bit aware of magics beyond runes, even were I not bound, by the depths of your knowledge you could bind me anew.” She doesn’t seem to even notice that she’s cut me off, barreling ahead. “Even in your Novice Tier as you are, you could bind me, though it might take some effort.”
“That’s kind of—.”
“Of five Class Skills I might have this tier, I have four. Healing Touch and Endurance you already knew of, Paladin’s Grace I have not spoken of, and Channel Divinity is the name of what I am using now. I have my full five General Skills: Instrumental, Dampen Damage, Conjure Weapon, Elemental Resistance, and Adaptive Resistance.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” My brain spins as I watch the fluctuations in the mana as she says those words, or maybe those Words, with a sort of metaphysical capitalization to them. “I… Amber.”
“My lord.” She’s breathing a little heavily, red-faced.
“I love you, you know that, right?”
“... why is it, my lord, that I hear a however in your words?”
I blink twice, and then change tacks for a moment. “I had literally no idea that you were making that grand of a gesture, and I really don’t know how to feel about it other than… immensely flattered and embarrassed and like I’ve been entrusted with the greatest treasure in the world. Also,” I admit, “I got a little bit distracted by something. It… kind of looks like the names of the Skills you mentioned resonant in some way in the ambient mana itself, and there’s some sort of interaction with your System connections? Which, wait. I can see those in the Visor now.” I really can. There’s not only a mathematical representation of the connections in new variables that are… how did I even intuitively know how to query for that? “Can you say the names again?”
“[Instrumental],” she intones. The Skill flares to full, wild life, and I start laughing softly. “Paladin’s Grace. Endurance.”
I kiss her to interrupt her, and then kiss her again in joy.
There’s too much, in a way, to explain. It’s like when I had my vision corrected not long after I fetched up onto the Spirit, after my eyes had settled enough to not undo the work.
There were trees outside the recovery room. There were trees outside the recovery room on purpose, with vast, clear windows and perfect lighting, and I sat there for a half hour after I should by all rights have left, and they didn’t bother me because they understood; I was hardly the first.
There’s even a pithy saying about it. It’s mana and motion, it’s the System and the Soul and connections, it’s Skills and conditions and other things I don’t have the right words for yet, it’s my Visor instead of my own vision, but it’s all the same regardless; the trees have leaves.