“So we hide again,” Falynn suggested. It was her first response, and her knee-jerk reaction to encountering someone stronger than her. When the other two failed to respond, she added tentatively, “Right?”

Roni scoffed, but Leonov was more patient. He shook his head. “You heard her, Falynn. Hiding won’t do us any good.”

“Well, fighting won’t do us any good either,” the druid said immediately. “You heard what she said. I’m a liability.”

“She didn’t call you a liability,” Roni pointed out. “She said that you need to be more aware so that you don’t become a liability.”

Judging by the stubborn set to Falynn’s face, she felt that those two statements meant the same thing. Doing his best to be patient, Leonov tried to explain further. “Falynn. You’re a very strong mage. We’ve both seen the evidence of that.”

He glanced back at Roni for her reaction, and she shrugged, though reluctantly. “It’s true. Compared to most of the druids I’ve met, you’re very strong.”

Falynn straightened a little at that. It wasn’t much of a compliment, but it still made her feel better. Leonov continued. “Your only weakness is that you’re a slow caster.”

“Well, that’s because I use prayers and rituals,” she replied, a bit defensive. “They’re always slow, but they have a lot more power.”

“But that’s just our point,” Leonov said, staring at her without expression. “You’re powerful enough to hold her off, or even do some significant damage. Why aren’t you?”

“Well, I don’t want to hurt her,” Falynn answered, lowering her face. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. I’m not a killer.”

Roni scoffed again and stalked away a few paces, unslinging the bow from her shoulders. In one smooth movement, she whipped an arrow free of her quiver, turned while drawing back the string, and then released. The arrow, glowing bright green with the magic of the bow, split into more than a dozen smaller bolts of energy, all skirting around her two comrades and reconverging into one three, where twelve small holes appeared, the energy having drilled into the trunks.

“If you don’t want to kill someone, then you need control,” she said tersely to Falynn. “If you can control your magic, then you don’t have to worry about that.”

“I can control my magic!” Falynn said, now angry as her proficiency was questioned. “I have a lot of control!”

“Prove it,” Roni hissed, stepping close.

For a moment, the druid girl looked torn between two decisions, but then her face hardened, and her annoyance at the ranger came to the forefront. With one quick flick of her wrist, vines burst out of the ground at their feet, quickly binding the ranger and pulling her arms to the side. Apart from a quiet grunt of surprise, Roni gave no reaction. Her face and throat were still free, however, and she smirked down at Falynn.

“See?” She said, leaving the question open for a moment. “You have the power and control you need to fight. If you want to be weak and not kill, fine. But if you don’t fight seriously, then we’re going to be killed.”

Falynn lowered her arm, and the temporary tree made of vines faded as they retreated back into the ground. “Fine. I’ll give it a real try. But I will never kill someone if I have the choice. And I won’t have you mocking me for that. Because it does not make me weak. Weakness is succumbing to what is easy over what is right.”

It wasn’t the first time the two women had had this discussion, and Roni’s reaction didn’t deviate from prior iterations of this point. She gave a quiet scoff and slung the bow back over her shoulder. “So I bet we have about twenty minutes left. What are we going to do?”

“We can try to trap her,” Leonov said. “That spell she used to reach us, it was some kind of teleportation. Falynn, can you use anti-magic?”

The druid shook her head. “That’s an arcane spell, designed to counter other arcane spells. I only know nature magic.”

But as she said it, a sudden thoughtful expression crossed her face, and she frowned, lifting one hand to cover her mouth. They watched her closely, wondering what it was that had distracted her, but she wasn’t giving anything away. It wasn’t until Leonov put one hand on her shoulder to gently shake her that she seemed to return to them.

“What is it?” He asked, keeping his voice level and patient.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Elderclaw-”

“That giant beast you woke up?”

“Yes. He, well… He blessed me.”

“Okay,” the warrior said, still patient. “What does that mean?”

“Well, he’s an ancient spirit, even if he’s not actually Ancient,” Falynn explained. Her brow was still pinched in a thoughtful frown as she worked through her thoughts. “He’s a being made entirely of living wood. If he just gave me a general blessing, that won’t mean anything. But if he gave me some of his power…”

She drifted off again, but this time, before either of them could prod her for more information, she turned away and paced a few steps to give herself some room. Then she lifted her staff, holding it in the air between her two hands, gripping it tightly. The thoughtful expression was gone, replaced by a look of fierce concentration. For several seconds, nothing happened. Then, suddenly, the staff snapped in half, and the two pieces curled around her arms like snakes, until they wrapped up around her shoulders, then fell still.

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“I did it!” she gasped, looking a little unsteady on her feet, but not tired. “I didn’t think I could do it, but I did?”

“We’ve seen you do that before,” Roni pointed out. “You’ve changed the shape of living wood plenty of times before.”

“But normally, when you split living wood, it counts as two entities,” she replied. “This is still one mass.”

“What does that mean?” Leonov asked. Admittedly, he knew even less about this than the two women, but he sensed that Falynn had broken some kind of ground in her training here, and also knew that if he posed questions to her, she’d work through it much more quickly. “Is that a benefit?”

“Oh, very much so,” Falynn said. Then she frowned again. “But I’m not good with close-quarter combat.”

“Then don’t use it for close-quarter,” he advised. “Do what you do best, but this time, just do it with the living wood.”

She appeared to ponder that for a moment, then slowly turned her head toward Roni. The ranger took a half step back out of sheer instinct. She’d never seen such a quiet determination in the druid girl before. It was almost unnerving. Falynn raised her left arm to perform the same spell with which she’d bound Roni before. And while grasping vines did rush out and grapple her, they came, not from the ground, but from the coil of living wood on Falynn’s left arm. With the other arm, she warped the living wood into a tiny snake dragon, which lashed out and snapped its jaws mere inches from Leonov’s face.

“By the mother,” Leonov gasped, one hand rising belatedly to ward off the snake dragon. “Are you casting two spells at once?”

Falynn’s face was positively glowing with glee. “I am!” I’m not doing actual full-power spells, but that was two spells at the same time!”

She released Roni, returned the snake to the wood, then joined the two pieces back into one. The living wood seemed to shiver as it was recombined, then stretched back out to form the staff that she’d previously carried. But she was smiling hugely all the same. “None of the druids back home can do that. Not even my parents.”

“Good for you,” Leonov said. He didn’t understand the full implications of what Falynn had just shown them, but she seemed a lot more confident now, which he accepted. The better she felt about her own skills, the more useful she would be in combat. “If we’re on the subject of new skills, I don’t have anything, but I can..”

He unbuckled the shield from his left arm, then, fiddling with something behind it that they couldn’t see, made a sharp click sound, and the top half of it folded down. He repeated this on the other side, then twice more, and when he’d finished, the shield had shrunken considerably to resemble a rectangular cube that protected his left forearm completely. Only in this form could the see the arcane mark that was on the part right over his fist. Falynn recognized it at once as a Rune of Dispersal. Any magic that touched that rune would be dispersed away at an angle, regardless of if it was an attack or a barrier.

“Technically speaking,” he said with a small grin, “I was never just a soldier. I was a Lieutenant in the Anti-Magic division of the Attosian forces. I’m very good at fighting mages.”

They both stared blankly at him, and his grin faded slightly. “I know it’s not as impressive as a new type of magic, but it’s very useful.”

“No, we get that,” Roni said dryly. “We’re wondering why you haven’t used it before.”

He gave a slight shrug. “Well, it’s a secret in our military. We don’t want foreign mages studying the enchantment and re-creating it. I imagine Tyrman would be very interested in learning how to create this rune themselves. And Archmage Bragg could figure it out very quickly, I don’t doubt.”

“Well, I guess that means it’s my time to show off,” Roni said. When they looked at her curiously, she closed her eyes. “I really, really hate doing this, but…”

She took in a deep breath, then shivered. As she shivered, her image seemed to flicker and distort, fading away to reveal what was underneath. The fair golden hair vanished at once, becoming stark white. The sun-tanned skin became pale as snow, and the eyes, once a warm brown, became a bright, piercing, icy blue. Falynn and Leonov did their best to hide their surprise, but their eyes were still wide, and Leonov’s jaw had dropped in surprise.

“So you really are a Changeling,” he said softly. “I didn’t know what to think when the Curate called you one, but it’s true.”

“Yes,” Roni said, her tone dripping with sarcasm. Well, at least that hadn’t changed, Falynn thought. She was still the same sarcastic, dry-witted Roni they knew and loved. “It’s true. But what I don’t tell people is that I don’t just change my appearance.”

They blinked again, looking expectant. She closed her eyes once more, lifting one finger to tell them to be quiet, and took in another deep breath. With a second shiver, right before their eyes, two more Roni’s appeared. They both had a bow, knives, and identical appearances. But to Falynn, they seemed even more identical, unlike when a mage copied themselves for a short time.

“Are they just as strong as you?” She asked, her eyes almost a blur as she took in the details of each copy as if trying to spot a difference. “Can they even use your magic?”

“They can’t do anything, really,” Roni said. “The most they can do is imitate what I know. Like this.”

Again, she selected an arrow, drew it back, and fired it at a nearby tree. The arrow gleamed with bright blue light this time, but didn’t split, and landed home into the tree trunk with a satisfying thud. The two clones had drawn and fired at the same exact moment as her, and while arrows did appear to fire from the clones’ bows when they struck the tree, they simply vanished, leaving no mark behind.

“There is a level higher than this,” she said. “Where I can inflict damage, but only in the person’s mind. If they see through the illusion, then it does nothing. But if I can trick them, then they’ll fall unconscious, believing themselves to be mortally wounded.”

Leonov let out a low whistle of appreciation. “That’s an impressive skill to have. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them and you.”

As if to prove his point, the Roni he was talking to and the one to its left both vanished from sight, and the original smirked. Leonov took a step back in shock, realizing that he’d actually been tricked twice. “Indeed. And you’d have to treat each attack as real and defend against them, or else risk getting injured.”

She looked down at the bow in her hand, her smirk still broad, and idly ran one finger down the string.

“So,” Leonov said, looking between her and Falynn, doing his own thinking now. “We know what each other’s abilities are now.”

Roni nodded. “But fair warning, I cannot do any of that if I am disguised. So do not count on it if we’re in a city. I’m not quite ready to show my face to the world.”

Leonov waved the comment away, looking more energetic than he’d done in the entire time they’d known him. “That’s no matter. We have a chance here. It’s not much of one, but it’s still a chance…”