I was in a bit of a catch-22 with my Dumines.

There was something happening in that non-euclidean space between the blue panels I was supposed to be seeing, and I was sure that if I could understand it I could proceed. Well, good news, I had both Perception and Comprehension so that should be easy... if I didn't need to understand it in order to unlock the ability to understand it. It was more frustrating than if it had just been clearly impossible.

I was sitting on the little bench at the front of my adorable fortune teller vardo wagon, which for reasons I couldn't begin to think of wasn't the same end as the door to the inside. It was my only complaint - I should have been able to go in and out at the front rather than the back, so I could keep an eye on the moskar. Well, on Shitheel. I'd originally named our moskar Sneezy, Dopey, Sleepy, and Grumpy - but it was quickly apparent that Shitheel's attitude went well beyond merely being grumpy and bordered on actual evil. Thankfully he was fairly content to walk along the road for the most part, but when he decided it was time to stop there was no arguing and any attempts to wash him down, adjust or remove his harness, or convince him to do anything when he was on break was a battle of wills I was so far losing miserably.

Katrin was riding with me so we could talk about the Dumine issue, leaving Errod to drive his wagon - driving in this case being just sitting there since there were no forks in the road and even Shitheel understood the idea of going forward. Elba was in her usual spot, perched on top of Katrin and Errod's wagon with some colored chalk - far enough away that she couldn't eavesdrop on us, close enough for us to notice if she fell off or something.

There was also a third wagon of very similar design, but that belonged to Granny. We had passed or been passed by a lot of other travelers on the road, but Granny had ended up camping at the same spot as us early on and we'd just quietly turned into a mini caravan after she had dealt with an unwelcome visitor. "Oh what a shame," she'd said over his screams, "the hooked end of my knitting needle seems to have become wrapped around a tendon, yes? Oh no, don't squirm darling. It is so much more painful if the tendon detaches."

She'd suggested that she could remove the hooked needle if he dropped some of the extra weight from his satchel, and he produced the brand new - and very fancy - shaving and toiletry kit Errod had purchased in Erathik. I dumped the rest of the satchel out, and while nothing else looked like it was ours I collected it all just in case. Call it a processing fee. Granny had carefully removed the hook and offered to bandage the injury, but the man ran off instead. I decided right then and there that I wanted to be her when I grew up.

"Your last name isn't Hurst, is it?" I asked - mostly joking - when I realized this was our second traveling companion that seemed like a random harmless woman but then kicked someone's ass. Granny was older than Mila though, and there was no intention to travel with us on any adventures - she was just "coincidentally" keeping pace with us, probably because she could tell we were young and inexperienced. With some people that might have felt condescending or made me want to ditch them on principle, but Granny seemed cool. Also, she had started teaching me how to knit - or the fantasyland equivalent, anyway. I wasn't sure about the difference between what I was doing and things like knitting and crochet on Earth.

As much as I liked her, I didn't want to be spending time practicing knitting - I wanted to be learning magic. And that was something I couldn't talk about around strangers, given my unique situation. "Okay, tell me again. You only see blue and a hexagon, but you feel... what, exactly?"

Katrin very deliberately didn't roll her eyes. I had learned how to notice that sort of thing on her. "It's like the feeling when you were selecting gifts in the Duminere," she said patiently, "just these vague impressions of what I can and can't do. It's like ideas are coming to me out of nowhere, though I suppose they're from some external thing. They say the Clockmaker made a copy of his mind and it lives in Quebristun, so maybe that's where the information comes from."

Connie had said something about that story, but it seemed like there were a ton of conflicting legends around the Clockmaker. "Okay. So... does selecting something feel like it did in the Duminere? Like, exactly?"

Katrin had already managed to build onto her Dumine. You had to gather potential, which obviously I jumped to thinking of in video game terms even though that wasn't really accurate. It wasn't experience points or skill points or anything, it was something to do with strengthening your lutore - that thing formed by the junction of your mind, soul, and body. Nobody agreed on the best way to do it. It just happened over time, but also it happened faster for older people by a little bit and was maybe increased by spending time in high mana areas or by eating certain expensive concoctions or by killing (and maybe eating?) monsters. It wasn't clear how much was bullshit.

Katrin had so far only made it so she could understand the writing in her spellbook on a deeper level using Comprehension. She said there was another layer to the complex runes, some sort of actual ideas encoded in there - plus some runes looked the same but weren't, in a way that sounded similar to when you couldn't tell if something was an uppercase 'i' or a lowercase 'l'. She was suddenly able to cast way more of the spells, although most were still beyond her for the moment. If she kept it up she would not only be able to understand more of them, but would be able to cast them faster and make little tweaks - and eventually make up her own new spells on the fly if needed.

"I wouldn't say it's exactly the same," she replied, "but it's at least similar. There's that same sort of... feeling of confirmation, of thinking 'yes, that's what I want'. And before that you can feel that there's other options, that if you change your mind something else might be possible. I overreached at first, and I could feel that what I wanted was an option in theory but I wasn't ready for it."

I closed my eyes again. There it was, that gap with... something... on or in it. I focused on the idea of perceiving it, of comprehending it, of being able to really understand what was happening in there. And it moved. Not only that but... had the blue changed, somehow, for just a second? I could only see it at all in the corner of my vision - well, not vision really since it was all in my head but... close enough. I tried again, and there was something. A feeling. "Okay, hang on. I'm getting something. Gimme a minute."

The movement I could sense was slippery, somehow. It wanted to change. Okay, that I could deal with. Katrin had said she got the vibe that what she had wanted wasn't something she had enough potential for yet. There would also have to be a similar error - for lack of a better word - when it was something you simply couldn't do at all. Were there other kinds, other restrictions? Possibly. Regardless, the first step would have to be "listening" for more information. It was possible I just needed practice, rather than magic. And so that's what I did.

I zoned out while knitting with Granny, thinking of different abilities and staring into that dizzying void. I continually popped in and out of meditation as I lay in my little bed at night trying to fall asleep. I challenged Elba to distract me and attempted to stay focused in on those impossible fuzzy movements in my mind, trying to completely tune out everything else - that one went badly, as Elba resorted to sucking on her finger and shoving it in my ear almost immediately. Nobody could meditate through that.

Meanwhile, the weather was getting cooler as we approached the mountains. Erathik was at the Northwest corner of the continent, but we were in the Southern hemisphere so that was close to the equator. Any further North than the actual city of Erathik and you started to hit some very hot jungles and then, once you got far enough away from the mountains, a huge sandy desert. The impression I was getting was that the differences in climate across the continent were more extreme than I was used to, but the variation from the seasons was less. We were right in the middle of summer - two thirds of the way through the sixth month - so I wouldn't get to confirm that for quite a while.

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As we passed through the mountains it got downright cold at times if the wind picked up, which was still a fun novelty for me - I'd lived in Arizona for too long, where even the middle of winter was pretty mild. I remembered it snowing a few times when I was younger and living in New Jersey, and one time when I was in the snow somewhere else... it felt like one of those out of place memories, something impossible. Just this flash of being somewhere cold, some city that didn't look familiar at all. And... a castle? Still Earth, though. It had to be something out of a movie or a television show, or - though I hated to entertain the possibility - just a completely fabricated memory.

When we were in the very middle of the pass, with the wagons pulled close together to give the moskar shelter from the wind and Elba tossing and turning in the bunk above me, I finally cracked my Dumine problem. It was such a small change, but suddenly I knew I was going to be okay. Unable to sleep, I'd been concentrating again on different abilities I might unlock and feeling for that push of ideas, or confirmation, or denial. Anything, really. And I had the thought that the Dumine was supposed to be doing something to my lutore, to the core of me, and I focused on that. I wanted to see magic, see what I could do, see the things that could be a part of me - and specifically how they lined up with my lutore.

You could always, I had been told, focus things on your lutore. It was how you differentiated between abilities that targeted yourself, or the area around you, from ones that targeted someone else. But when I felt something shifting, branching out, growing like roots... there was a jarring readjustment at the last second. It was what I'd detected a few times before, that feeling like it was wiggling free of my mental grasp, and so I forced it back. I held the idea as hard as I could in my head, and finally felt something in return.

If I had to put it into words, it would be "you're not allowed to do that, do this instead". I let it flicker over, and forced it back. Forced it again, let it go back. Over and over, trying to get a feel for what was happening. I could sense it, not through the Dumines but through something deeper - something inside me. Even after the howling winds died down and Elba stopped flipping over and mumbling I just lay there, fidgeting with my core and trying to detect where this was in relation to the rest of me. I remembered the feeling when I had damaged my lutore by using mana I didn't have, that cracked feeling - but what was cracked, and where?

And then I felt the layers. Just for a second. That was what was shifting, my attention was being shunted from one layer of my lutore to another. Was the Dumine forbidding me from interacting with certain layers? I wasn't even sure how many there were - probably six or thirty-six if it held to the same rules as the rest of the world - but I did recall that woman we'd paid to confirm I could use magic had said she couldn't detect the layers properly. She'd found the third layer but not the first two, and then there was something else - a gap where another layer would be, maybe?

I wasn't sure if that meant something was broken about me and that was causing this error, or if the Dumine always kept people from messing with that part of the lutore and the other thing was unrelated. It just had to go on the big list of things to research someday. In the meantime, I tried brute force for a bit. No luck. Then I tried really thinking about the difference between what I was trying to do and what it was suggesting, and after a while got another flicker of information. It was incomplete, but enough to tell me the two had very little in common. What I wanted was to look at my lutore itself, and what the Dumine wanted was to show me things within a certain layer - an area of effect around me.

I switched tactics, and focused on the idea of seeing all the layers, every part of my Lutore. Not just the bits I was forbidden from, or the bits it wanted to let me mess with, but everything as if it was one unit. I kept feeling like it was working, saw those vague shapes moving, and then they would snap away. I pulled harder, flexing imaginary muscles, and pictured melding all the layers of my lutore into one thing, one concept, one indivisible shell. The layers were an illusion, surely - they were all part of an aura surrounding me, why couldn't it be a gradient rather than distinct bands?

I began to feel strained; before, I'd felt like my lutore was cracked or injured. This, instead, felt like it was being twisted and molded. I pictured a partially-inflated balloon, being contorted into different shapes. I felt an opening, but right as I tried to accept the power something jumped and I felt potential flowing away, lines that had been twisting now burning into place. I'd unlocked something, but not what I wanted. I didn't let up, forcing it harder.

I realized then what had happened - one of the Dumines had been failing, and another had taken over. Okay. I tried again, feeling for that shift. Over the next hour I started to get a feel for the three Dumines, started to be able to detect which one was doing the heavy lifting. Of course it wasn't really the Dumine itself, not entirely - it was something working through the Dumines. But that thing, whatever it was, didn't seem to be all that smart. It was an automated process, or based on instinct, or something like that. And if I pushed hard on one of the Dumines, really got its attention, I could switch to another all at once and there was a sort of delay.

Another hour, and I was able to rapidly cycle through them. Head, foot, chest. Head, foot, chest. Head, foot, chest. They were responding faster and faster, matching my own improvement. Eventually they even started to activate just ahead of my attention hitting them. I'd start to move my request from my head to my foot, and the foot Dumine was already ready to reply. I kept the cycle up, faster and faster. All I had to do was hold what I wanted, that illegal pattern, there in my mind. Before it could be forced into a new shape I slammed it against the next one - head, foot, chest, head, foot, chest, head, foot, chest, head, chest.

Whatever dumb program, or spirit, or magical algorithm was controlling things tripped over itself. I'd skipped the foot Dumine, and it had tried to respond anyway. The chest tried too, and... it was hard to put into words. My understanding was still shaky, my intuition over what it was trying to say to me foggy at best, but it felt like I'd forced two Dumines to try and access the same thing at the same time and they'd blocked each other. The request slipped through. My lutore rippled as something bound the layers together, and right on the heels of that success I pushed through and demanded the ability to perceive and comprehend what was happening to my lutore. Deprived for the moment of the layers it was used to and still dealing with the conflict of now three Dumines all trying to reserve access, that request clicked into place as well.

The gap between those blue fields was abruptly in focus. The lines were four-dimensional and made my head hurt, but I could see them and they... made sense, somehow. Not fully, but just enough. I could see that some points were burned deep into my core, like anchor points permanently welded to my lutore. From there, strings and webs reached out across everything. The anchors were my gifts. Perception, Comprehension, Temporal, Probability, Planar, Spirit, Thought, Binding, and... Fate, I guess. I thought about being able to travel to other planes, and glowing lines appeared - they were less solid than the ones that were already there, and flickered as they changed configuration.

It was anchored to one node in particular, which I knew somehow was Planar, but also touched on Probability and Binding. Interesting. I could feel the information Katrin had described now, but in a different way than I expected - it didn't feel at all like it had in the Duminere, more like I was overhearing a distant voice from the end of a long hallway. This was only one of many possible ways I could breach the membrane between planes, but it didn't matter - I was out of potential. I'd spent it all on... hmm.

I dismissed the glowing lines, and looked closer at the ones that were already bound in place. The first one, the one that was an accident, was anchored on Perception but touched literally all of them - I wasn't sure what that would let me perceive, but I set it aside for the moment. The second was Spirit, Planar, Binding, and a little touch of Fate. Why would all of those be involved in linking the different layers of my Lutore? Planar in particular seemed out of place. The last was, not surprisingly, mostly Perception and Comprehension but with entanglements to the previous ability.

I opened my eyes, and the normal three-dimensional world felt wrong for a moment. I climbed out of bed, full of anxious energy. Most of what I had done was just fixing a problem caused by my extra Dumines, so there wasn't anything I could think of that I could actually do with it. Nothing flashy, anyway. But there was that first, accidental, ability I'd unlocked... surely that did something? I wasn't certain how to activate it, so I just thought about it and blinked and -

There were lines in the air, threads reaching out of my chest. Most vanished just inches away from my skin, but some passed right through the walls of the wagon. I turned, and they stayed where they were - they were either tethered to some external point, or orienting themselves like the needle of a compass. I had a ton of them, and once I thought to look I could see that Elba had one too. I wanted to run to the other wagon and wake Katrin up, but I realized I wouldn't be able to show her anyway. Also, I was realizing, it was about to be morning and I'd stayed up all night wrestling with my brain. I was exhausted.

I tucked myself back in, and felt sleep closing in around me. I blinked again, watching the threads glimmering in the air. I wasn't sure what I was doing, exactly, but it was magic. And I'd be learning a whole lot more now that I was in control.