Tala took deep breaths, eyes closed, desperately focusing on four things at the same time.

Well, that wasn’t quite fair.

She had four of her bloodstars locked away with four clones of her instructor in this lesson, Mistress Kaeti.

The woman was clapping in slowly changing patterns, each clone following a different cadence as Tala listened.

Tala was then moving her hands, each on beat, each with one of the four.

Beyond that, she was moving her elk-leathers in alignment with a third, causing a bit of white steel to manifest and fade away as her means of tracking. Finally, she was transforming Flow between a knife and a sword on rhythm with the last.

To be fair, she was also using her willpower and focus to enact the aspect mirroring for each perspective, so it was more like an eight-way split, at least.

Alat was being helpfully silent as Tala struggled with this basic exercise that Mistress Kaeti had provided.

Honestly, Tala had improved remarkably under the woman’s tutelage. When Tala started, she had struggled to keep two separate rhythms. Now she was struggling to do twice as many.

Twice the struggle, twice the reward. Strain aside, she was doing it, though.

“Good, Mistress Tala. We still haven’t found your natural limits so that we can begin to push. So, I expect we’ll see quite a bit of quick progress and improvement over the coming weeks.”

Tala opened her eyes, knowing this to be the next step of the practice. She did her best to keep the four distinct, randomly changing rhythms going. “Thank you, Mistress.”

She strayed off with her left hand and quickly corrected.

“This is… somewhat exhausting.”

“That’s expected. You haven’t really used this much. It’s like we’ve found a muscle that you’ve neglected. You aren’t mentally weak; you’re just unpracticed.”

They continued like this for another few minutes before Tala felt her focus irresistibly slipping, and they called an end to that form of practice for the moment.

As they sat a few feet apart, Mistress Kaeti brought up the subject that they both knew she’d been avoiding, “So, reality nodes.”

Tala sat up just a bit straighter. “You’ve been able to dig into them?”

“I have. I apologize for my silence on the subject, but it was rather a shock to learn that my magic was doing something so… monumental without my really realizing it. I always knew that any damage to an iteration hurt all of them… all of me, but I didn’t realize that it was literally me, iterated across existence.”

“So, what did you learn, if you don’t mind my asking? I also picked up some information on reality nodes, and I’m happy to share if you’d like.”

The other Refined smiled softly. “I’d like that, thank you. You keep record of your memories, correct?”

“I do.”

“Would you be willing to share some of what you’ve experienced of reality nodes? I’d also like to see my abilities through your eyes, if you’re up for that.”

“That sounds more than fair for all the training we’ll be doing.”

Mistress Kaeti grinned. “That sounds incredibly agreeable to me. Done.”

They talked for a couple of hours, before agreeing to meet up again sooner than they’d previously planned to do some testing and experiments.

Mistress Kaeti promised to bring an expert to the session, so that they’d keep things at least relatively safe.

Tala smiled at the other woman, “I look forward to it.”

* * *

Tala growled as she moved her bloodstar through the intricate, vast obstacle course, liberally spotted with iron spikes—her iron spikes.

Her aura stretched farther than she’d ever gotten it, thanks to Master Akra’s instruction.

She’d started by extending it as far as possible before placing a ring of iron spikes. From those spikes she was able to extend further, though not even close to as far as the initial distance from herself.

From there she’d repeated the process until she could fill the entire Refined training area they’d booked for their sessions.

In Master Akra’s words, that’s when the real work had begun.

She was to enact her aspect-mirrored perspective, and her positional control of the bloodstar, through the closest iron spike at all times.

Approaching her aura in such a segmented manner had been impossible for her at first. Then, she’d been unable to distinguish which spike she was reaching through, to somewhat frustrating results.

Only after weeks of practice could she begin to do as he’d asked, and toward which he’d been instructing and guiding her, and even then, it was incredibly slow.

This was the first time she’d had to navigate the bloodstar through anything other than the open training area.

It was an ‘obstacle course’ only in the loosest sense, though her mind made it out to be a tremendous difficulty.

In truth, it was a single ring to move through and an upright stick to circle and then land atop.

Even so, it was monumentally harder than simply floating her bloodstar across the roughly even, open space.

Regardless, she succeeded, finally opening her eyes with glee shining from within them.

“Wonderful progress, Mistress Tala. I think you’re ready for the next step.”

She hesitated at that. “I thought that the obstacle course was the next step.”

“Oh, it is in one sense, and we’ll move to more complicated variations of that, but I mean the next step for your aura control, in general, not this specific branch of the skill set.”

“Alright…” she said hesitantly, “What is it?”

“I want you to pull your aura back toward each spike until you no longer have contiguous control over the space as a whole. Make each spike an island of your aura in a sea of unclaimed space.”

She felt her eye twitch. “I don’t suppose that’s the end of the escalation?”

He barked a laugh. “Oh, no. Once you can do that consistently, I’ll contest one of your aura-bubbles, and you’ll have to resist without changing any of the others.” He grinned. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s see what you can do with the task at hand.”

Tala nodded, firming her resolve and hardening her will.

She could do this.

As it turned out, no, no she could not.

At least not that day.

It was another week—and three more advanced versions of the obstacle course—later before she finally opened the first gap within her own aura net.

Two days later, she had rivers of unclaimed air coiling around most of her iron spikes, though she still had tendrils of aura connecting each of the isolated pockets.

She was feeling a bit dejected with the difficulty, but she had decided that this was something worth working at, no matter how long it took.

She wasn’t in this for quick gains or the checking of boxes for advancement.

She would master this because she could, regardless of how long it took.

She would master it because she chose to.

* * *

Tala barely kept herself from growling as her hair was frozen to the point of shattering in a tinkle of falling ice… again.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

-Just don’t regrow it this time.-

It shouldn’t be an issue to begin with.

-Yeah, well. You aren’t reading the flow of heat as well as you think.-

You mean we aren’t.

-I’m you, so I choose to see you as the problem.-

That brought a smile to Tala’s face, and even brought up a chuckle through her dry throat. Thank you, Alat. I needed that.

-I aim to please.-

It was amazing how much moisture the cold could suck out of the air.

Mistress Deigh, the ice-focused Refined that Tala had met on her first day back in Alefast, strode around her in a slow circle, “Mistress Tala, extreme cold is a useful hazard in your arsenal, but not a deadly one. You need to be comfortable with its effects so that you know how they will affect your opponents.”

Tala nodded.

She knew that the Refined was right, so she grit her teeth and moved back into the maze of frozen and freezing air.

There were so many flows of energy around her, and rather than resisting any of them, she let her senses ride them through her surroundings.

Mistress Deigh hadn’t just made bursts of cold—or sucked heat from various sections of the room. Instead, she had created interlacing, supercooled patterns underground that pulled in heat, creating currents and vortices.

More than that, there were magics woven into the cold itself, somehow.

Heat capacity? Tala frowned as she felt her body fighting back against the unnatural cold.

“You severely lowered the temperature, then you massively inflated heat capacity?”

“Very good. There’s more to it than that, but that is essentially the basics.”

“What happens to the energy when your working fades? Will there be an explosion of heat?”

Mistress Deigh smiled mischievously. “The energy was spent raising the temperature. Altering specific heat doesn’t change temperature, so a return to ‘normal’ heat capacity doesn’t cause any temperature change at all.”

“Huh…”

“But how my magic works isn’t why we’re here. What’s happening to your body, your flesh, your thoughts?”

“The attempted crystallization within my flesh is irritating, and it is taking a surprising amount of power to counter, but I suspect that’s because of your magics.” Tala narrowed her eyes implicatively.

“True, but not on topic.” Mistress Deigh smiled in return.

Tala grinned. “Fair, fair. Every breath is uncomfortable; it hurts to move about; my joints feel like they should be aching, but I’m obviously not letting the cold penetrate that deeply.”

“And how many do you think have resistance to cold on your level?”

“Most? I mean, I don’t actually have a resistance to cold, I just have a robustness to my physical body.”

“Ahh, but that is a resistance to cold. You have enhanced every aspect of your body, that includes your ability to generate heat at need, when you are cold.”

“I… huh…” Tala bit the side of her lip. “You know, I’d never really thought about it in those terms.”

“Understandable. Most magical healing, even at our level, is very specific. Most physical defenses, similarly so. We block and repair trauma. For environmental issues? We avoid them for the most part.”

“But when properly used, they can tip the balance.”

“Precisely.”

“Alright, what next?”

“Next?” Mistress Deigh grinned broadly. “Next you get familiar with the cold effects of your magic.”

* * *

Tala exhaled with a sharp, precise breath, moving her lips and tongue as Master Doitean had been teaching her, her desired result in mind.

She never thought that she’d see so many diagrams of the human mouth, nor that she’d ever be taught, using a massive Archive display that allowed for looping images, showing exactly which muscles pulled in exactly what manner to form the various desired results.

Tala had amazing control of her own body, but she had to know what to move.

This level of instruction solved that problem nicely.

Unfortunately, that still left a few issues.

First, she wasn’t whoever the images were modeled after, so while following the instructions exactly got her close, it wasn’t precisely right for her.

Second, she needed to be able to make the various shapes with her mouth and tongue instinctively.

In both cases, that meant practice.

Master Doitean’s solution, after she got close to having the movements right?

Sparring using only breath weapons and maneuverability.

She had been concerned about hurting him until he’d demonstrated one of his defensive abilities, which very precisely heated the air around his body, creating powerful currents that moved directly away from himself, weakening or negating most ranged attacks.

It obviously wasn’t perfect, and Tala had caught him with glancing blows in the past, but he was surprisingly robust, even beyond the expected levels for a Refined.

Her short burst of breath was laden with power, but carefully below the threshold that would allow it to ignite the air.

Her second breath—as she dove and rolled away from a stream of blue-hot fire—was stronger and more sustained, causing Master Doitean to leap to the side, exactly as she’d hoped.

He let out a distorted curse as a small amount of the power within her first breath made it through his defense—him moving directly into an attack was a weakness of that defense—and left a dissolving patch through his cheek.

Yes. There’s no way for him to use a breath weapon now that he—

Her victory was short lived, as his curse had been distorted due to proper mouth formation for a truly terrifying breath attack.

No. No! That’s ridiculous. How?

A beam of white fire, no thicker than her little finger, lanced out at her, not expanding in the slightest as it cut across the distance between them in a blink.

It speared straight through her un-metaled shoulder and out the other side, leaving a cauterized hole.

No defensive magics for me. She grimaced against the pain.

She understood the reasoning. The point was to teach her to anticipate and use breath weapons. If she just stood and took the hits, that would teach her very little.

They would incorporate her defenses soon, he promised. After all, it was also important for her to know when and if she could take a hit from various breath weapons.

“Match.” The word sounded a bit odd, given his missing cheek. Master Doitean smiled, the expression looking rather menacing with so many teeth exposed.

“How did you get out a breath attack without a cheek?"

He chuckled, speaking with clipped words to overcome the distortion from his missing cheek, “Well done, but I’ve experienced similar things before. I used my defensive magics.”

Tala’s head rocked back slightly as she made an ‘Oh’ of understanding. Her shoulder was healing slowly, the cauterization slowing down the process, but not overly so. “You used the currents of air around your body to press inward, containing and directing the breath attack?”

“That, and my aura.”

She grimaced. She wasn’t allowed to use her aura yet, either. She understood why. It was a crutch, a useful crutch, but it would inhibit her growth in this area. Even so, she focused on the other part. “How do you have such fine control over the currents of air?”

He grinned again. “Heat, Mistress Tala. When used with understanding and skill, it is more precise than a scalpel.”

She shook her head, glancing to his exposed teeth once again. “We should get that looked at before we continue.”

He shrugged. “I’ll swing by the healers while you practice dispersion patterns.”

Dispersion patterns were exactly as they sounded, the different shapes that a breath weapon could take after exiting her mouth.

It was something she was starting to grasp, but practice was rarely amiss.

Tala nodded. “As you wish.”

* * *

Tala spit up blood as she did her best to quickly return to her feet.

Master Cru was there, slamming a gauntleted fist into her chest yet again.

This time she reacted properly, spinning on her planted foot and flowing around the hit, allowing it to slide off of her as she smacked the man with a backfist, laden with as much iron-mass as she could quickly shift and allow to come to bear.

They’d moved past training blows long ago, though she was confined to weaponless combat for the moment.

Impossibly—though not unexpectedly—her knuckles met the broadside of a wide-bladed sword, which she drove forward, slamming into Master Cru’s torso, and launching him to skip across the arena.

The interposing weapon had distributed the near-lethal blow into one that simply moved the man a considerable distance.

Tala growled. That was not what she had wanted.

With still-startlingly perfect movements, the Refined flipped back to his feet, sliding to a stop, seemingly no worse for wear.

She knew what he was going to say before he said it.

He knew that she knew, but he said it anyways, “Hit down, Mistress Tala. Throwing an opponent away is wonderful for gaining space, and I’m sure it served you well when you were a butcher for the arcanes, but here we are protecting the weak and innocent. We need to keep threats contained.”

She didn’t let herself get distracted by the repetitious, intentionally irritating words. She crouched, amplified her surface-area-enhancing scripts and launched forward as he shot toward her as well.

She knew that he’d expect an overhead attack, meant to follow the instructions in a powerful way.

He’d do the same and somehow the clash would end with her embedded in the ground yet again.

Even reviewing the clashes, she had a hard time picking out what she was doing wrong.

He simply moved perfectly, exactly where he needed to be to counter whatever she did and deliver his own attack.

It had happened a dozen times already, if not more. She could see them all, in not quite a montage. To her mind, they were all overlapping, easily seen together in all her failing glory.

It was time for something different.

She aimed lower, and even as she did, she saw the frown of irritation on the man’s face.

She was going against his instructions.

She spun as she dropped, letting her back hit the not-sand as she slid under him, a comically large warhammer bearing down on her.

Even so, she was able to tuck her legs up to her chest and kick straight upward.

Master Cru’s eyes widened as her feet connected, the surface-area expanding scripts giving them good purchase to throw him straight up, into the ceiling.

She used the motion to kick up, landing on her feet right beside where they’d clashed.

Above, there was a cacophonous BOOM as Master Cru slammed into the ceiling.

A moment later, he came crashing down, heading for exactly where she’d launched him from.

She swung her fist to intercept him, but he somehow hit the back of her hand with a u-shaped blade hard enough to drive her attack downward before a morningstar caught her in the now exposed back of the head.

She faceplanted into the ground.

He wasn’t even winded as he stood over her. “While I applaud your desire to not listen to your opponent, I am trying to teach you, here.”

Tala rolled backward, coming back to her feet as she cleared debris from her face.

“Still,” he glanced upward, “You did keep me horizontally locked, so well done there.”

“Thank you.”

“Now, let’s try to aim our attacks downward shall we?”

She grinned. “We can certainly try.”