Tala was starting to get concerned about Rane, and it was beginning to grate on her nerves.

It had been a week, and Rane had yet to wake up.

From a Healer’s perspective, he was doing just fine.

No matter how many times she asked, that was their answer.

It was starting to get frustrating for everyone involved.

His body was continuing to recover as expected, but his mind had yet to put itself back together enough to allow him to wake up.

There was no neurological damage that could be detected, and it was true that sometimes people took up to a month to wake up after some Refining sessions.

Tala had been reassured of this.

Apparently, such a state of unconsciousness wasn’t a predictable thing, either.

Sometimes a person’s first or second Refining session would lay them out for weeks, and then, they’d wake up within minutes after their third or fourth.

Sometimes, people never had a long bout of unconsciousness at any time during their Refining process.

Regardless, she had to wait, and she hated it.

Tala continued her training, now with four iron shapes spinning around her head at nearly all times.

She’d managed to extend the illusion of the through-spike outward enough that no mundane could see those spinning, constantly roiling and twisting shapes.

That helped with the odd looks she had been getting, looks that usually changed to ones of recognition due to her minor fame as a Defender.

It was all a rather large inconvenience that she was glad to be rid of. Though, she was still recognized, just not as often.

She also continued her work as a Defender.

There were more assaults on the walls, but she mainly left those to her unit-mates. They had very kindly been letting her take on most of the interesting beasts that attacked up until recently, and so she decided to return the favor, simply acting as backup when needed.

She was no longer the newbie of the group, having been with them for the better part of a year.

Overall, Tala felt like she was in a weird sort of stalled state, even as she improved her various skills and capacities.

She had nothing that she was specifically aiming for, even though she was working to improve across the board.

The closest thing to a goal was the design, testing, and implementation of improvements to the now segmented Kit, and that was progressing well, just like everything else.

Still, she was looking toward an eternity of… this.

Is that really what she wanted?

It didn’t seem very appealing.

She often found herself grimacing or groaning at that thought.

It felt so passive, so temporary, so… sisyphean.

I hope Rane wakes up soon…

* * *

Tala was in the room when Rane woke up, another two days later.

He groaned, shifting in his bed before his eyes fluttered open.

She was at his side in an instant, taking his hand so he would know she was there. “Hey.”

His eyes tried to focus on her. “Hey… What’s… oh…”

He closed his eyes again, and Tala gave his hand a light squeeze. “Yeah, you’ve completed your second Refining session.”

Rane lifted his other hand up high, making a fist. “Success.”

There wasn’t much enthusiasm behind the gesture, but he was barely awake, and his throat was clearly incredibly dry, despite Healers keeping him well hydrated in general.

He let his upraised hand fall back to the bed even as he squeezed her hand in return with his other. He tried to say something else, but let out a dry cough instead, grimacing at the unpleasantness.

She manifested a bit of iron into the superficial and manipulated it into the shape of a hand.

The iron hand grabbed the handle of the earthenware mug and floated over to her, moving carefully to not spill the water it contained. “Here, drink this.”

She used her own fingers to move the straw around and against Rane’s lips.

He took a careful sip, swallowed gingerly, and smiled, sounding much better when he spoke, “Thank you.”

Tala simply nodded in response, though she felt a small smile pulling at her own lips in return.

“How long?”

She instantly knew what he meant despite the few words.

She knew that Rane wouldn’t care how long he’d been unconscious. That was irrelevant, really, now that he was awake, and he knew that. He would be focused on what mattered.

He wanted to know how far he’d gotten into the Refining session. “You bore through the whole session. It ended when the construct cut the flow of power.”

His whole body seemed to relax, almost sinking into the mattress a little, and he let out a massive sigh of triumph that was monumentally more sincere than his previously raised fist had been. “That’s… that is fantastic.”

She smiled, even though he couldn’t see it given his closed eyes. “It really is, Rane. You did well.”

He smiled again, eyes still closed. “Thank you.”

“For?”

“For being in there with me. For being here. I know you’ve not been here the whole time—at least I hope you haven’t been—but it’s nice to have you here, now.”

She squeezed his hand again, then pulled together a chair for herself out of iron and sat.

Tala was about to ask him something else, but then she noticed that the cadence of his breathing had changed.

Rane had fallen asleep with a small smile still pulling at his features.

She closed her mouth, the corners of her lips still uplifted.

There would be time to talk later.

He would be fine.

He was awake.

* * *

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Tala and Rane walked through Alefast slowly, side by side, close enough that either’s elbow would strike the other with a simple movement.

He had recovered, physically, much faster after this second session than after his first. He was strong and coordinated in all the simple tests the Healers had put him through.

Even so, he was still carrying what seemed to be rather severe cognitive and psychological issues.

He was once again a bit slower of speech, taking long moments to think through his responses when asked a question.

If he brought up a topic himself, he seemed to be rather good at continuing to dialogue about it, but any change of subjects was a bit difficult for him as of yet.

He seemed to twitch at odd times, and Tala thought they were when his thoughts drifted to memories of his ordeal.

As she watched him recover, thinking about her own Refining and that of so many others, she thought she understood the utility of mind magic, even if she deeply despised it.

True, she’d been assured by those she’d asked that just removing the memory wouldn’t actually be helpful. The soul remembered more truly than the mind ever could, even a mind as enhanced as Tala’s. When it came to magic, that is what mattered more than the memories held by mere biology.

But that brought her thoughts back to Rane.

His hair had started to regrow at a healthy rate, and he hadn’t accepted any of the offers from Healers to accelerate the natural rate for any of it.

Rane’s lengthy unconsciousness still weighed heavily on Tala, even if everyone else seemed to have dismissed it as just one more part of Refining.

She had a theory as to why he’d been unconscious for so much longer, and why his mind was still in process of healing even now nearly two weeks later.

She’d run it by the Healers, and they’d agreed it was possible, even if they hadn’t seen a reason to investigate further. After all, the unconsciousness never killed anyone going through the Refining process, and it was generally regarded as helpful, given the Archon in question was given more time to heal in perfect, undisturbed bedrest.

Tala was not so easily dissuaded.

As to her theory, it was relatively simple. After all, the black sludge had been forced out everywhere.

His brain had been surrounded by the stuff that was being forced out. It made sense that that would increase his cranial pressure until he blacked out.

-Oh, that’s a terrible pun.-

I didn’t mean it as a pun… but yeah, that is pretty bad.

It was only after the black ooze faded from existence that the inscriptions and magics could fully come to bear in order to bring him back to full health, and even then, the magics were slow to work, given it was recovery from a Refining, and everything was approached with utmost care.

The Healers said that their investigations and magics wouldn’t have addressed such an issue, because there would be too high a likelihood of the substance retreating back into Rane’s mind, harming his Refinement if they even were to investigate the potential for her theory to be true.

Tala, for her part, had seen the sludge around his brain with her threefold sight, though she’d not specifically noticed it until she went back through her memories, looking for what might have caused the extended unconsciousness.

Honestly, it could be the very reason that any of those who were Refining went unconscious.

Whatever session causes the most ‘cleansing’ of their brain would lead to extreme cranial pressure.

-And those who Refine more uniformly would either fall into unconsciousness every time, or not at all.-

Precisely.

It was as good a theory as any, especially since it didn’t mean anything.

While they could technically cut a hole into the skull of someone who was Refining, having such an injury to the body during, or even shortly after, the process could cause issues.

There had been historic examples of people Refining without being fully healed beforehand—or being injured within hours of Refining— and it had never ended well.

But all that was beside the point.

She was walking through the city with Rane, and while she didn’t need to help him walk, she was definitely helping to guide him more than usual.

The man was getting distracted rather easily, and he would occasionally even just stop and stare at her with a growing smile until she prodded him back into movement.

She found herself smiling in return, probably just because she was glad that he was up and about.

As much as she enjoyed visiting him, she was glad to be out of the Gredial estate while doing so.

Even so, he wasn’t ready to simply go out into the city to wander aimlessly. So, at the moment, they were on their way to lunch in her sanctum.

Rane was very clearly getting tired of Alefast in a way that she could understand, even if she didn’t feel the same. He had been essentially convalescing in the city for the last month and a half.

Now, he was looking at another long stretch of the same, with more stints in the near future, and that was if he got what he wanted.

So, Tala thought eating within Kit, where the view was entirely different, would be good for him.

He had happily accepted her invitation.

It didn’t take them too much longer to reach the expanded area from which Tala could pull into her sanctum, and with a minor act of will, she and he were suddenly within Kit.

Rane stumbled slightly, and she helped to steady him.

“Well, rust on me. Were we that close? I didn’t think I was that out of it.”

“About three blocks?”

He seemed to take a long moment to process that. “How?”

Tala thought for a moment, herself, then shrugged. “I’ve been working on extending Kit’s effective dimensionality.”

He frowned, clearly looking irritated at his own confusion. “I… don’t follow.”

“I should be able to draw anyone into Kit who is dimensionally aligned with the space within Kit.”

He nodded, seeming to have reoriented on the current subject, and that was helping. “That I understand, but Kit is dimensionally bound by the pouch, right?”

“Originally, technically, yes, but actually no. Especially not now that we are bound.”

His frown deepened just slightly. “Explain?”

“Just like my magic has an aura, Kit’s dimensionality has a range of authority, as it were. It is especially the case now that Kit is untethered. Her connection to the superficial only exists where and when we wish it to, and I am working toward getting her range to match Kit’s actual inner dimensions, but right now, I’ve gotten it to about a three block radius.”

“Tala, that’s…that’s close to 2 miles across. Right?” He frowned, clearly trying to do mental math.

“Just a bit more than one, actually.”

“Still… that is massive! That reaches outside the wall from Artia and Adrill’s shop, right?”

“It does, yeah, if just barely. Part of it is that there is some odd interference between how our cities function and extending Kit’s reach. It takes much more… reach? Yeah, it takes more reach to reach outside the walls. Basically, it is harder to reach in that direction,” she finished a bit lamely.

Rane grimaced, clearly trying to get his metaphorical feet under him, “Is it a circle?”

“It’s a bit oblong because of Kit’s new configuration, and of course, because of the city wall so near at hand..”

“Can you rotate that shape? Reorient it?”

Tala tilted her head to the side. She hadn’t considered that. Then, she shrugged and tried it.

It worked. She could feel the odd connection that she had to Kit’s reach sweeping through the near part of the city.

There were some odd limitations to what that actually meant.

The primary one was, while she could open a door anywhere within the space—just like she could open a door to anywhere within Kit—without a door, she could only pull sapient life into Kit from the outside.

Animals and items seemed to require some sort of opening to come through, which did line up with the vision she’d had when bonding with Kit.

Therefore, it wasn’t really an unexpected restriction or oddity.

Still, even with the restrictions, she understood the utility of what she’d been working on.

She could move effectively instantly within Kit, and if she could push herself out of Kit—and draw herself into Kit—from a large area, she could move a bit like Terry, even if as a two step process and only when she was near her soulbound storage.

Still, she’d have to experiment with that in the near future, not at that moment.

But all of this was neither here nor there.

Rane and Tala were standing beside a small feast divided across two ‘personal’ tables.

Tala’s spread was quite a bit larger than Rane’s as well as being decidedly more magical, but his wasn’t exactly small, and there were definitely bits of magic scattered throughout.

Rane’s mind seemed to have moved to the food as well, because he began chuckling. “You still have some with my magic left?”

She shrugged. “I think I always will at this point. It seems to breed true, and Kedva’s got a good handle on things in that department.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, there are two varieties that are useful with your magic, it seems. One which ends up with usable magic in its meat, and the other with it in its eggs. Sadly the eggs of the first and the meat of the second are quite useless to you or me.“

“Isn’t that a rusting shame.” He was grinning.

Tala chuckled in return. “Quite.”

They both moved forward and sat in their respective chairs—just within arm's reach of each other—oriented to look out at the landscape before them.

They were in a little patio on the far side of the central hill of her sanctum from her dining area and bedroom, so the view was actually a bit novel to them both.

“This really is a lovely place.” Rane’s voice was soft as he spoke, clearly settling into the moment and not wanting to disrupt it any.

Tala found herself nodding even as she spoke in response, “Some good can come out of almost any bad.”

He nodded too. “That’s how to get over it…” He grimaced, likely realizing that he was in the middle of his current trial, “or to get through it. We have to find the good.”

“Isn’t that the truth.”

They fell into silence for a long moment before beginning to eat, almost as if in sync.

They both smiled at the coincidence but didn’t stop or comment on it. After all, they were both starving.

It was a fantastic meal, as they had come to expect from Mistress Petra and Kedva.

Each dish was worth spending time enjoying, and they tried to do so, even while they devoured every bite.

Around the meal, in the small spaces and between bites, they chatted about little things, laughed, and smiled.

But more than anything else, they simply enjoyed the company, reminisced about the past, and tentatively let hope begin to build about what the future might hold.