Tala, Master Simon, Adrill, Brandon, Mistress Vanga, and Rane were all in Tala’s sanctum to witness an experiment and provide assistance in case of disaster.

Disaster didn’t seem to have struck as of yet, so things were looking up.

On the other side of things, the compression of water into a siege orb was not looking viable.

The new, odd block of ice rested on the ground some hundred yards from the group.

Tala willed for them all to be beside the block of ice.

As soon as they arrived just a few feet from the odd thing, Rane took a step back. “I… I think I’d prefer to wait back there. I’m still not reinscribed.”

“Oh! Right.” She shrugged, feeling a bit embarrassed at having forgotten. “Okay.”

And he was back in his chair. He gave a grateful wave before picking up his cup.

Adrill, Brandon, and Master Simon were already moving around the rounded block in fascination, various magics sweeping through the result of Tala’s experiment.

It probably would have been a sphere, but Tala’s will had been holding it in a vaguely cube shape up until the point that the magics compressing the material had lost their lock.

Of those looking closer at the ice, Brandon spoke first, looking at his slate, “Am I seeing this right? The water molecules seem like they’ve been aligned into a tetragonal crystal lattice.”

Adrill was nodding, but Master Simon was the one to answer. “It seems so, yes.”

“I didn’t think that structure was possible for this material?”

“Not easily, but possible? Yes.”

Brandon took a moment to think, then nodded.

The three performed dozens of scans and tests before Master Simon looked to the others.

“I am curious what it feels like. The surface seems to have been coming up to temperature, but there’s no sign of melting.”

Adrill nodded. “A test of contact could give more data.”

Brandon simply nodded.

Without further delay, Master Simon reached out and touched the ice tentatively.

He sucked in a harsh breath as he pulled his hand back with a startled jerk.

Mistress Vanga was at his side in a blink.

Her magics rampaged through him even as her eyes widened.

She drew a knife and cut off the man’s arm at the elbow in one seamless motion. “Mistress Tala, isolate the ice and the hand. Now.”

Her voice was calm but also utterly overflowing with authority and a sense of command.

Tala didn’t even consider arguing with this ancient expert. She did as instructed, specifically pulling a bit of dimensionality off to the side within Kit and moving the ice and hand into it.

Tala took a moment to examine the ice block even as she moved it. Strangely, it was a bit irregularly shaped now and bigger than it had been, if just barely.

That’s odd. What—

Then, she felt herself pull in a startled breath.

She hadn’t been paying close attention to their surroundings.

But, with the block gone, she’d naturally widened her focus, which let her see, immediately, that there was ice that seemed to be growing deeper into the ground, taking in all moisture and turning it into more ice.

Worse yet, the speed of expansion increased with the surface area of the leading edge of that expansion.

With an act of will, Tala tore out all the ice, putting it with the block in the segregated space.

That caused the soil before them to desiccate, creating a little depression in the earth.

Rane seemed to have heard Mistress Vanga, or at least he heard her well enough to pick up the tone. He had stood from his seat, clearly concerned, but he didn’t come closer, not yet.

Tala met his gaze and he nodded. That was enough for her, and she brought him back over.

After he blinked to regain his bearings, he turned to Mistress Vanga. “What happened?”

Master Simon was standing stock still as the Healer worked on him, his face seeming to actively be becoming more pale.

Mistress Vanga was obviously tense. “Mistress Tala, can you find any ice within Master Simon and remove it? I am ready to heal the damage.”

It was only then that Tala noticed that no blood was flowing from the severed stump at the end of Master Simon’s arm.

Tala didn’t waste any time, immediately slamming her aura down upon the Fused man and overwhelming his natural defenses.

He stiffened but didn’t actively resist, which made it both quicker and easier for Tala.

Within his body, she found the same phenomenon of water being pulled free from everything else in order to form oddly growing ice within his flesh.

With another act of will, Tala tore the ice from him.

It required a lot of focus and mental energy, leaving her gasping even without him resisting in the slightest.

Even so, there was no magical resistance from the ice itself, and it was all taken from him.

The man’s color worsened instantly, and Mistress Vanga’s magic immediately set to work, having a far easier time healing his Fused body than she had when working with Tala’s inhuman, Refined one.

A moment later, Master Simon collapsed backward into the chair that Tala had called over for him even as he fell back into it.

He gave a weak smile of thanks before glancing toward Mistress Vanga. “Thank you for the hand.”

There was a collective moment of silence before a few of them burst into initially-tense, stress relieving laughter.

The rest followed, and soon they were all sitting, mostly on the ground.

When they’d calmed down again, Tala asked the critical question. “What happened? Why is the ice not melting? How was it growing? There wasn’t any magic to it that I could sense.”

Master Simon gestured toward Adrill, then grimaced at the memory as he realized that he’d used his new hand. Even so, he still asked his question, “Would you care to give your best guess?”

The man nodded in response. “From what I was able to determine, there was something special about the molecular structure of the ice, the edges of the structure were primed for more water to be added. Therefore, it was actively grabbing any water molecules that came into contact with it and adding them to itself by sheer force of nature.”

Tala blinked a few times. “Is that possible?”

Master Simon shrugged. “It’s what we witnessed, therefore possible or not is hardly the question. I’ve heard of a theory of a ‘ninth’ form of ice that would behave in this way, but it was never pursued for hopefully obvious reasons.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Ninth? There are nine forms of ice?”

“More, apparently. It is not an area that I’ve studied, but I think there might be nearly twenty?”

“That’s… huh.”

Brandon interjected, then. “Water can form all sorts of interconnected forms, and so I believe each one is simply a different stable or semi-stable structure.”

Tala grunted, then sighed. “What do I need to know?”

Master Simon answered, “From what I am finding in the Archive, its melting temperature should be a dozen or so degrees above human body temperature. In theory, melting it should destroy the chemical structure, and remove the self-propagating nature.”

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Tala nodded, seeking out the heat that she’d vented from her earlier process.

She was about to move it, when she realized. Wait… Since when can I shift around temperature?

-That’s what you’re concerned about in this situation?-

It seems rather important.

-Fine. Yes, so long as we are unopposed, we can move basically anything around in here, within the bounds of physics.-

Meaning?

-I don’t think we could get something below absolute zero, or force truly unstable bonds. I also don’t think we can manipulate anything physical below the level of a group of molecules.-

That’s something… We also don’t seem to have truly minute control.

-Aside from ripping the ice from Master Simon?-

Those were rather big chunks, and I just made sure I didn’t leave anything behind at the edges.

-Fair.-

Tala stopped delaying and took the latent heat that she’d shed from the previous work and moved it to the segregated ice and hand.

There had been a lot of waste-heat from Tala’s earlier experiment, and all that remained was dumped back into the water.

In the end, the massive block of water was well above something a normal human could swim in, and the hand was thoroughly poached.

Let’s not think about human flesh in cooking terms, please?

-Even when it’s accurate?-

Especially then.

-Fine. I’ll try to remember and help you remember.-

Thank you.

Tala nodded once. “Alright, I think I’ve resolved that issue.”

She explained the results of her work, and the group seemed to relax.

Mistress Vanga gave Tala a long, long look. Tala returned the gaze, confused. “What?”

“You realize that what you just created is the type of thing that would be put into a cell, right? If we didn’t know how to deal with it?”

Tala hesitated, considering. “I… did not think of it that way.”

Master Simon nodded. “This form of ice would be, in theory, a world-ending event. The lack of magic would actually make it harder to track and deal with.”

She nodded slowly. “I can see that, yeah.”

There was a long moment of silence.

Finally, Tala spoke again. “Let’s do everything we can to ensure that I didn’t miss any of it, and that property is gone, now?”

There was a hearty agreement.

As the others got to work—using the magics available to them to delve deeply into the area—Adrill cleared his throat.

“Yes, Adrill?”

“Let’s not compress water any more?”

Tala considered for a moment. If compressing water would turn it into ice, that wouldn’t work as explosive projectiles. “Sure, I think I can agree to that for the time being.”

Everyone seemed to relax a bit more as they buckled down and continued to work.

* * *

Tala and Master Simon discussed the nature of her siege orbs in great detail after the ice incident.

They agreed that she should probably not act on anything but gasses for the time being, and they set up a series of experiments to determine if there were any such gasses that were better than others for the purpose.

They knew that she could take things like ash or coal or the like and make diamonds or gems of other kinds, depending on the starting materials, but there wasn’t much point.

There was some interest in gems for jewelry in the human cities—and likely the wider world—but Tala was hardly the only Mage capable of creating such. There were gem-focused Mages who could create them in virtually any shape and size, which was a step beyond what she would be capable of without lots of practice and difficulty. Thus, there really wasn’t that much demand, and what demand there was—including for use in the creation of Archon stars—had a steady supply.

On a different note, Master Simon had finally managed to create two more ingots of the white steel. Tala was rather excited as she had found so much use for the metal as a form of almost-liquidly-moldable, physical armor overtop her elk leathers.

Two bars wasn’t a lot, but apparently the process was either efficient or fast, and Master Simon had opted for efficiency, given the fact that they didn’t particularly have a pressing need for the material at the moment.

Aside from those discussions, her usual training and duties, Tala spent most of her time with Rane.

After all, he could undergo his next Refining session in just a week’s time.

* * *

Rane was pacing outside of the small room in which he would take the next step toward being Refined.

It was notably a different one from where he’d endured his first session, partially because that one had yet to be fully repaired.

Tala already had Rane’s equipment, including Force, hidden against her, inside the armor that she wore thickly around her body.

She was trying to practice Master Limmestare’s techniques of lots of small, breakable layers that would disperse attacking power as they broke rather than transferring the force straight through.

It was relatively easy to have all of Rane’s stuff about her, because all it really was, came down to Force’s handle, with a leather cord wrapped tightly around a nub just above the crossguard.

That dimensional storage device held the rest of his stuff, along with Force’s blade.

The handle was locked in place across her low back, just above her belt and the weapons she had resting there.

She didn’t really need to have her weapons so out and ready like that, not with the changes made to Kit, but it was what she was used to, and she was still searching for a way for Kit to remain just as useful to her while being accessible to those who worked in her sanctum.

But Tala realized that—like Rane—she was attempting to keep her thoughts from the upcoming process.

Rane turned to her, his gaze much higher than usual as her hexagon lattices of white steel, encased by iron, even surrounded her feet. The all encompassing armor made her larger in essentially every dimension.

The construction of it had actually taken her a strangely long time, due to its complexity, but now she had the intricate pattern Archived, as well as within her own mind for easy reference.

Rane’s voice pulled her from her thoughts, “Tala… is this a mistake?”

She almost let her helmet melt back away from her face, but then she remembered what she was supposed to be practicing. She also remembered how much of a pain it would be to rebuild the faceplates if she fully removed them, even with the reference model available to speed things up.

She reached out to her through-spike, reactivating a portion of the illusion magics, while not disturbing the minute magical signature the device constantly projected to prevent any misunderstandings with the city’s defenses.

I am curious how I’d fare against them in this armor… but it’s decidedly not worth the risk.

-Wisdom, Tala. It is wonderful to see you growing in wisdom.-

Hush, you.

With some delicate manipulation of the through-spike, a figment of her face appeared across the smooth surface of her helmet, designed to look like she’d made the armor transparent. The illusion even extended to her voice, “Rane, the choice is, always has been, and always must be yours. If you choose to proceed, I’m going to be in there with you.”

He huffed a laugh, shaking his head. “Yeah, you look like you’re expecting the end of the world.”

She smiled, making sure that her illusion mirrored her actual expressions. “I don’t want you to be distracted or worried about me getting hurt.” She shook her head, trying to dismiss his worries. “I could stand naked in there and heal just fine from any injury.”

Rane’s cheeks colored at that idea.

Tala sighed. She almost snapped at him to focus, but then she realized that him feeling embarrassed at her poor example was better than him feeling nervous or concerned.

Finally, the young man shook his head again. “Yeah, I don’t think I could Refine with you—or anyone—naked in the room with me.”

-Of course not, that’s how you reach Paragon.-

It was Tala’s turn to color, and she pointedly did not mirror that onto her illusion. Alat! That is not appropriate. It’s also not accurate.

-Ahh, but if it was…-

Then, we’d live in a very, very different world.

-...fair.-

“Rane. I should not be your concern. I will be fine. This is just a perfect opportunity to practice my active defenses while helping a friend.” She smiled. “Thank you for letting me do both of those things.”

He huffed a laugh. “Thank you for being willing to come in with me. It definitely makes me more comfortable at the idea of what is to come.”

Her smile grew a bit warmer. “Of course.”

He gave her a long look. “Are you going to try to examine the black sludge again?”

She hesitated, then shrugged and nodded. “I think so. Master Simon is finding some interesting things about the similar material gained from Adrill, Brandon, and Kedva, around our other projects. It is definitely oriented toward reality in some way that we can’t really understand. It both seems identical and radically different, person to person. This is likely because, at its core, it is definitely a conceptual substance, with as much about it beyond our grasp as we can learn about it, physically.”

“Conceptual? Like arcane magics?”

“Like that, yeah, but not actually magical. It makes some sense. After all, concepts aren’t inherently magical, just like magic isn’t inherently conceptual.”

Rane grunted. “Fair.”

Master Grediv walked around the corner at one end of the hallway, and both Tala and Rane turned toward the Paragon, falling silent.

The older—yet not really older looking—man came their way with steady steps, and Tala had an interesting thought.

Alat, we basically all choose for our aging to stop around our mid to late twenties, right?

-Or regress back to roughly that physiological state, yes.-

I wonder… do any of the changes that happen as mundanes age allow for more… wisdom?

-Meaning, you think that something in the brain chemistry might change, allowing for longer term thinking?-

Yeah.

-I don’t believe so, but I can look into it while you are otherwise occupied.-

I’d appreciate that, thank you, Alat.

Master Grediv stopped a bit down the hall, on the other side of the door that led into the Refining room.

“Rane.”

“Master Grediv.”

“Mistress Tala.”

“Master Grediv.”

There was a pause, then the man shook his head, clearly showing his uncertainty. “This is your choice, then? You will undergo your next session?”

Rane left a respectful pause. Then he gave a slight bow. “This is my choice, yes.”

“So be it.”

The heavy iron door swung open away from them, and the Paragon gestured toward the small room within.

“After you.”