ACT TWO: 'ADJUSTMENT'

Lucas breathed in the warm, dry air and focused on the heat of his body. Through his heat vision, he saw a large bubble of greens and yellows and reds with his cross-legged red form at its centre. His heart was highlighted in stark white on a red background, blazing like a sun and pumping magical heat through his soul.

It was shaped, naturally, like a sleeping cat.

Inhaling, the surrounding heat flowed towards him, condensing around his body and turning the air arid. On exhaling, heat dispersed outwards as he pushed more warmth from his heart’s flame out in an omnidirectional wave. In his mind’s eye, it was like watching the tide go in and out, and on every cycle the air turned a slightly darker shade of red. Even the water below him, rushing by in a torrent, was starting to take on a hint of yellow in his heat vision, warmed by the increasingly toasty rock he was sitting on.

His firehand was the only thing that could compare to his heart’s flame. It wasn’t quite pure white to his pyromantic sense, more a startlingly bright white-red colour. When he curled his fingers, the areas where muscles and tendons were supposed to be brightened. It was an odd sight. The transition from flesh and blood arm to fiery hand was a hard line, but he felt no pain in his wrist. If anything, the only sensation came from the firehand, a slight tingling at its base where it connected to his mortal arm.

It was like having a neverending case of extremely mild pins and needles. It was incredibly annoying. There would come a point, he was starting to think, when he’d be tempted to ask Jamie to eat the bloody thing. Jyn had demonstrated it was possible to regain a regular human form after turning part of one’s body into flame, so Lucas wasn’t at the point of despairing yet. He just had to figure out an apparently master-level pyromantic technique. No big deal.

Exhaling sharply through his nostrils in frustration, Lucas snapped his firehand out in front of him and exerted his will. Jamie cracked an eye open where he was curled up in Lucas’ chest, and a second later power surged through Lucas’ pathways. Heat filled him, shooting through his system in a flash. Pressure built in his firehand, rising until the limb glowed in his heat vision with a dazzling nimbus. He could feel the rage of the fire snarling like a wild beast, demanding to be unleashed so it could consume.

Lucas opened his eyes. Then he let down the walls that had been subduing his mundane senses.

Moonlight reflected on a torrent of foamy white water that cascaded roaring and hissing through a trail in the rocks a few metres from where he sat. Wind sighed through a copse of tall oak trees on the opposite bank of the rushing stream, kicking up the occasional bit of detritus, but the breeze couldn't penetrate the sphere of heat around him. Steam danced skyward. The smell of baking rock invaded his nostrils. Sweat dripped down his face and his bare chest and back, making little hisses when drops fell onto the toasty rock. A few trails of wispy smoke flickered up here and there as dry twigs and little bits of kindling caught alight and quickly burned out like twinkling stars.

Lucas drew in a deep breath, then let it out. Inhale. Exhale. His firehand was ready to explode, a massive amount of fire packed into an area too small to contain it. Its shape started to warp, bulbous growths of white-hot flame bulging up out of his control.

Curling all his fingers but the index, Lucas picked out a tree at random and took aim. Then he let the heat free.

A beat later, a line of fire speared forth like his finger had abruptly grown a thousand-fold in length. The night lit up. The tree he’d been aiming for exploded, splinters flying through the air. Its top half spun end over end from the force of the blast, then crashed to the ground in a flaming heap, while the bottom half erupted into flames like it had been struck by lightning, glowing cracks spider-webbing down the trunk.

With the first obstruction felled, the line of fire kept going, hitting another tree with similarly devastating effects. Then another, boom after boom. It would have kept on piercing and burning and exploding forever, but, alas, the heat and power Lucas had packed into his firehand didn’t last nearly so long.

The pressure he’d built drained rapidly, and soon the line of fire started to lose its horizontality, slowly turning into a stream of liquid flame spouting from his first knuckle like a hose. Eventually, the technique had not enough power to even sustain the stream, and an uncontrolled gout of flame bloomed in front of him in a wide cone. All in all, the technique lasted no more than a few seconds.

A satisfying improvement.

Lucas let it sputter out until all the extra heat he’d built up was gone, watching it leave his body through his pyromantic sense. It was oddly mesmerising. Like a lava lamp that flowed in one direction in a single stream. The mana pathways in his firehand were spiritually no different to the rest of his body, carrying the hot mana of his heart’s flame. He could have pumped more into the technique, but there was currently only so much his pathways could handle before he felt like he was going to burn himself up from the inside.

As cool as he’d thought Jyn’s technique had looked, he wasn’t anywhere near ready to go full living fire mode. He hadn’t even figured out how to turn one hand back to flesh and blood yet.

Far before that, he had to finish expanding his pathways. In the two weeks since the Pentaburgh incident, he’d gotten all of the pathways in his arms and hands open. Next on the agenda was following the system down his torso and into his legs. It was distinctly uncomfortable for his arms to feel so much more than the rest of his body. Spiritually, he pictured himself like one of those guys at the gym with bodybuilder arms and piddly little chicken legs. Valerie hadn’t commented on it, but he was sure he looked comical to someone who could sense such things.

Unfortunately, the arms and legs were, Valerie explained, the simplest parts of the mana system. They were ‘just’ limbs, after all. Nothing really complicated was needed there.

The torso was another matter. In terms of one’s physical form, it contained the bulk of the organs that kept the place running. Spiritually, it was a similar story.

“The Heart is the centre of your mana system,” Valerie had explained. “Yours won’t be well developed yet, barely distinguishable from the rest of your system. It’s supposed to grow as you do, maturing by the time you become an adult.”

With more time on his hands and nothing pressing needing doing as they travelled south, Lucas had taken a night to map out as many pathway openings as he could find. There were thousands of them. Tens of thousands, even. Hundreds upon hundreds in each arm alone. Passively expanding multiple pathways at once had made the task less arduous, but progress was still far from fast. He still had to go through the process of opening them individually. He was getting better at that, at least.

And, just as Valerie had said, there were a lot of pathway openings around the area where his heart was located in his physical body. Maybe even as many as a thousand. That was probably going to be deeply unpleasant, when he eventually got around to it.

Speaking of unpleasantness, he thought, redirecting his ire at the grim future prospect to a more present source of irritation: his firehand. It had settled down to its default state with the built-up fire mana spent, burning merrily away. He clenched his fingers to form a fist, then pressed the tips of his knuckles down on the stone ground.

The sensation of mild burning flared in his knuckles, like he’d just touched them to a hot plate right out of the dishwasher. It wasn’t painful, per se. Just his body communicating to his mind, “Hey, this is quite hot.” He pushed further, sinking his firehand halfway into the stone, and the sensation spread accordingly. He wondered what would happen if he pushed it all the way down until his flesh hit the rock, but chickened out.

When he lifted his firehand once more, there was a black scorch mark in the approximate shape of a fist on the stone. He stared at it for a while, thinking.

Jyn had told him mana had memory. Somewhere in his mana, there was some kind of record of what Lucas’ hand was supposed to be.

But he had no idea how to find it, let alone make use of it.

After reaching out to suppress the fires on the other side of the stream, Lucas let his connection to Jamie go dormant. The heat of fire aspect mana started draining from his channels, his magical energy gradually returning to its base equilibrium. Pushing himself to his feet, making sure to steady himself with his flesh hand and not the fiery one, he strode to the edge of the rock and hopped off before the heat of it could start to affect him, then continued on towards their camp for the night. He stretched his arms above his head like he was trying to pull himself upwards as he walked, earning some satisfying pops and clicks from his body.

How long had he been sitting down? Judging by the position of the moon among the tapestry of blinking stars, it had been about two hours since they’d finished with exercise and sparring for the day.

He didn’t think he’d ever concentrated on one thing for so long in his life. Sure, it was magic and all. A little bit more interesting than mundane homework. But still. The Gift popped up in unexpected ways at times, growing his abilities in things he hadn’t even been focusing on.

It was something he’d noticed for himself a while ago, but Valerie’s keen gaze had seen things more precisely.

After the battle with Jyn and their draining conversation following it, Lucas had slept much of the day away only to wake up to Valerie sitting nearby with a thoughtful look on her face. She’d told him quite casually, “You fall asleep easier than you did when you first joined our party. And you sleep more deeply.”

Putting aside the fact she’d evidently watched him sleep, it had been an intriguing revelation, and only the first of many.

They’d remained in and around the city for a few days so Lucas could take advantage of the plant network for as long as possible; quite apart from his desire to learn all he could from the massive technique itself, its mana database to transform plants was invaluable, granting him the ability to cross traits between plants that he couldn’t yet do on his own, and repeating the giant vine trick on a smaller scale allowed him to weave some new and better clothes aout of plant fibres with minimal mana expenditure. (His old set had been shredded under tonnes of rubble in the Summoning Hall. His sack had suffered a similar fate.)

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Even in that short time, Valerie had observed changes in him. They weren’t massive leaps and bounds in progress, but, according to her, days of practice condensed into hours. Things he actively put his mind to like his magic saw rapid growth, but everything else passively improved too. His posture got a little straighter, his casual movements more graceful, his enunciation clearer. Even his breathing was refining.

Most impressive of all, apparently, was Lucas’ recovery time. Exhaustion just didn’t seem to stick to him anymore, the aches of a long day’s exertion gone by the morning. He was getting fitter just by existing.

That had led to a day or two of focused exercise, to see how much improvement he could expect there. Valerie had bullied Lucas into joining her on a jog around the city, and he hadn’t even expected to finish the first one; approximately fourteen kilometres when he hadn’t done any training for a month was no joke. Instead he huffed and puffed his way to the finish line, and the next day was a few minutes faster and a little less tired, and the day after that yielded the same result. The soreness that usually lingered after long runs faded within hours.

Similar results came in strength training, though with only big rocks to pick up and put down the improvement was less measurable. It felt progressively easier, though. Undeniably so.

When they’d started making their way south with Dawnguard as their destination, Valerie had insisted on a workout routine at the end of each day, taking advantage of Lucas' remarkable recovery time. Situps, pushups, crunches, squats. The usual. He wasn’t at the point of flexing ripped muscles yet, but after a week and a half of working out at the end of every day’s travels he was seeing some definition all over. More than should’ve been possible, in such a short space of time.

Thus, Lucas’ days had been rather full since he’d left the city behind for the second (and hopefully last) time. Breakfast was typically followed by a few hours’ walking before they’d stop for lunch, after which they’d walk until a couple of hours before sundown, at which point they’d go through a workout routine followed by some combat training with Valerie which basically amounted to her kicking his arse for a bit. The rest of the evening he was free to work on his magic, as he was doing now.

(Not that he wasn’t working on his magic all day, too. His multitasking was another thing that was improving, and fiddling with his mana and/or magic while keeping watchful of the world around him was getting easier. Practically the entire time they were travelling, a portion of his attention was dedicated to prying open new mana pathways.)

Seeing such tangible improvement in himself was as exhilarating as it was frightening. He found himself thinking about Jyn’s pyromancy as he made his way back to where Valerie and Wick were sitting, attempting to analyse how the Wandmaster had performed those feats. He was especially interested in the glyphs. They seemed more mystical than merely throwing fire around, as he was currently doing and Jyn had disparaged.

Wick and Valerie had set themselves down on a bit of flat grassy ground next to the stream, and they probably hadn’t said a word to one another since Lucas had ambled off a few rocks over to practise his magic. Sure enough, when Lucas reached them, Wick was sitting by the water and staring off into the distance, lost in thought, while Valerie was hunched over her scroll as she’d taken to doing for the last two weeks.

They’d spent the better part of a day picking through the Summoning Hall, Valerie systematically recording every inch of the array painted on its floor while Lucas kept the plants at bay. Lucas had been shocked to see it intact, considering most of the roof had fallen. But the rubble had been nowhere to be seen. The plants had somehow protected the array from any damage.

That had implications, another clue to the mystery of the plant network.

Valerie was a deft hand with her black pencil-ish thing, and the iconomancy on her map had allowed her to dive into the deepest bowels of excruciating detail. Apparently she was still invested in the mystery of why Lucas hadn’t shown up for a hundred years even though he was now evidently here.

“If the array itself was the problem, I’d like to know,” Valerie had said when he’d asked her about it.

“And what if the array wasn’t the problem?” Lucas had asked.

She’d looked at him then, her eyes sharp. “Then I keep pursuing other possibilities until I find the answer.”

In the present, Lucas approached her and peeked over her shoulder. She’d enlarged a small section of the diagram where strings of stylised symbols spiralled around one another in a row of intersecting helices.

“Any progress?” Lucas asked.

“Nothing substantial to report,” Valerie said without looking up. She trailed her finger over a set of symbols. “As you can imagine, the array is rather intricate.”

“Anything I can help with?”

“I don't think libremancy would be the best use of your time at present.”

Lucas shrugged at that. He'd never been a book guy, he wasn't going to argue the point.

“How goes your pyromancy?” she asked.

“Good enough, I guess.”

“Hm?”

“It’s just… It’s a powerful tool. Really packs a punch, as you probably heard back there. But I wouldn’t feel confident using it in a fight. The delay from my heart’s flame having a mind of its own is too problematic.” Lucas grimaced. “Then again, a lot of my floramancy tricks are pretty slow. But with plants, it’s like I’ve peeked behind the curtain to the upper levels of the craft and gotten some clues on how to get there, while the path forward for fire is more opaque.”

“Your progress isn’t as fast as you’d like?” Wick asked. His eyes were still distant, but he’d tilted his head to listen.

“Does that make me sound kinda whiny?” Lucas asked, running his flesh hand through his hair. It was awfully tangled and getting a bit long, but there wasn’t much in the way of shampoo or scissors around here. Valerie had offered her sword for the job, but he'd politely declined.

“It’s a very human thing to be frustrated when learning doesn’t come easily,” Wick said. “I would know. The shield is the simplest of the Five, and even that had me out of my mind at times. No fast learner was I.”

“You seem pretty damn good at your job to me,” Lucas said, then immediately realised that probably wasn’t a good thing to say, given everything that had happened.

Wick smiled, but it was a brittle expression. “It’s been a long and difficult road to get to where I am, with many mistakes made along the way. That’s just how it is for most of us.”

“So I am coming across as whiny. Floramancy skewed my expectations for myself, I guess,” Lucas said. He sat down by the fire, watching the flames dance. With Jamie now dormant in his chest, he couldn’t sense the heat of it, but he could feel it well enough. “But then, even beyond the Gift I was relying heavily on the plant network there. Maybe I wouldn’t have advanced so fast without it.” He shook his head. “I just can’t help wondering what my progress would have looked like if my heart’s flame was normal.”

“From what I understand, your unique situation was necessary,” Wick said.

“Yeah,” Lucas said. He sighed. “Yeah.”

Valerie looked up from her scroll and squinted at him. “Have you eaten?”

Lucas sighed again. “I have, yeah. Salted beef jerky didn’t exactly hit the spot, but I ate it.”

“You always have your fruits,” Valerie said.

“I got sick of those a long, long time ago.” Lucas sighed for a third time. “I’m gonna sound whiny again here, but I’d kill for a sausage roll. Gourmet local bakery or Greggs, I don’t care.”

The problem was, Jyn had been the one with the ingredients for stew in his little portal thing. Valerie had looted his wand, but apparently his storage space was accessible only by him. She had supplies of her own, so it wasn’t a total disaster. But it meant for much less appealing meals in the last while.

At least he’d been able to weave together some bedding for himself. If he’d had to go back to sleeping uncomfortably just as he’d been getting used to something soft beneath him at night, he would’ve screamed. Wick had taken to sleeping in his armour, which he never seemed to leave these days. And Valerie had always been content with her cloak.

“Do you even have sausage rolls here?” Lucas mused.

“If you’re referring to ground pork cooked in an intenstine casing then wrapped in savoury pastry before being baked in an oven, yes, we have them,” Valerie said. “There’s a good bakery near the Moontower, run by a family who’ve been there for generations. They season the sausage with firepetal and sage and sprinkle the pastry with pink salt from Eiyr.”

Lucas’ mouth watered. “Careful talking like that, you’ll have me running the rest of the way to Dawnguard.” A thought occurred to him. “Hey, did the concept of a sausage roll predate Jamie’s arrival here? If they didn’t, I bet he bullied someone into inventing them within a week.”

Valerie smiled. “They’ve been around a long time, but Lord James’ well-known love for them did increase their popularity for a period. Hardly a staple food these days, but common enough.”

“He ate them for lunch pretty much every day,” Lucas said. “The night before the array snatched me up and dumped me in Pentaburgh, he’d been complaining in the group chat about our plans to go to some new baguette place for lunch because they don’t do sausage rolls there.”

“He was known to get quite upset if one wasn’t at hand,” Valerie said.

“I’d never heard of this,” Wick said.

“The little quirks of the Heroes often get lost among the dazzling shine of their great deeds,” Valerie said. “But the information is out there, if you think to look for it. It’s simple enough to form an idea of their personalities from biographies and diaries and such.”

“I’ll want to read those,” Lucas said.

“We’ll ensure you get the opportunity,” Valerie said.

Lucas nodded. He could feel a bout of melancholy creeping in, so he sat up straight and pasted a smile on his face. “Hey, can I make some guesses at what else they introduced to Aerth?”

“Be my guest,” Valerie said.

“Hm. Well, Claire’s an obvious one. She definitely introduced that one library system, if there wasn’t something like it already. I forgot the name.”

“Dewey Decimal Classification?” Valerie offered.

Lucas snapped his fingers. “Yes! That’s the one. I bet she found an unorganised library and lost her damn mind.”

“She told me once she worked as a part time librarian.”

“Not for a while, but yeah, she loved it.” Lucas sighed wistfully. She hadn’t worked at the library in years. Or a century. He wondered if she still missed it as much now as she did back then. Probably not. “She quit because of uni stuff. Her parents are kinda strict.”

Valerie gave a wry smile. “Lady Claire chafing under strict authority figures. How ironic.”

“Yeah, she could be a tyrant herself.” Lucas chuckled at that. “As for Rian, I can’t say what he brought up first, but I bet he had people playing football with him within a month.”

“The game is still popular today,” Valerie agreed. “Though the professional leagues he envisioned failed to catch on. The world is too tumultuous for that, unfortunately.”

“I do love a game of footy. I play goalkeepr, of course,” Wick added with a subdued smile. He didn’t seem to ever grin like he used to.

“And Aarya… well, I already know she tried to get video games going.” He shook his head, smirking to himself. Ridiculous woman. “Actually, I think she’d be more likely to bring some part of her culture. If Diwali isn’t a thing here because of her, I’ll eat my shoes.”

“It’s evolved to be more about honouring Lady Aarya herself than what she intended it for,” Valerie said softly. “But yes, the celebration is still popular. Light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance. Those are words people can get behind, in these times of darkness and evil.”

Despite the grim reminder, Lucas smiled. He spoke of his friends well into the night, and felt lighter for it.