After a few minutes of rest—nothing but well-water cycling—Vayra’s core involuntarily clenched and sent pangs of spiritual power racing through her body. Tendrils of yearning stretched out through her limbs and out to the very tips of her fingers, and that was when she knew it was time to advance.
The process wasn’t as long as she expected, not compared to most of the other advancements, but that didn’t make it any less rigorous. She sat cross-legged in front of the well, hands folded together, but her core had done most of the work.
“It’s about cementing the alterations you have made to the core,” she said, recounting the lecture Nathariel had given. “Compact it like clay, then fire it.”
Phasoné droned, ‘This one didn’t take too long…as best as I recall…’
Vayra pulled all the Arcara she had refined into the core, then surrounded it with a formation of mana. Her breathing picked up, and her willpower stretched to its limit.
She constricted the sphere of mana until the orb of her core began to shrink—but only a little. The outer walls, previously glowing light gray from the outside, flickered between a stunning white and black, until Vayra guided the light how she wanted.
Painting streaks of white, she scattered stars around the orb, turning the cohesive light back into a canvas. The majority of it was white, pinpricks and pointillism forming miniature nebulae across the orb, but a few little black wisps seeped through.
Then, guiding the mana with her mind and breaths, she pushed it through in a single wave. It was like roasting clay in a kiln. The core strengthened, no longer malleable, but neither was it fragile.
As soon as the core was finished, she collapsed onto her back and splayed her arms out.
The effort and concentration of the advancement, combined with the previous fighting, was enough to drop her unconscious.
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Vayra sat up, stretching her arms and yawning. It had only been a few hours, because the sun was only just starting to dip down—late afternoon.
Or, it could have been an entire day and a bit. With how rested and…new she felt, that was entirely possible. As far as she could tell, there were no physical changes, but her channels felt just a little wider and open, and the air was just a touch more fragrant.
“Only a few hours, thankfully,” Phasoné said. The Goddess had dipped out of Vayra’s body by now, and her wireframe projection was sitting near the edge of the clearing, weaving baskets out of strips of the enormous flower petals.
“What are you doing?” Vayra asked.
“We’ll want to store as much elixir as we can,” Phasoné said. She tilted her head back, where five purple, woven flower-petal baskets waited. They were each about as big as a barrel, and they each had two layers of weave to give them a little more structure.
Vayra tried walking across the clearing over to them, but each step, more and more peat and moss clung to her feet. Most of the nectar from the nymphs had dried on her, making a sticky coating, and she was certain her entire backside was covered in dirt. She’d need to find a good river or something to clean off in.
When she finally reached Phasoné, she picked up one of the barrels. It was woven so tight that it wouldn’t leak when filled with Golden Elixir.
“I figure Larra is still looking for us, and has to be getting pretty close,” Phasoné said. “It’s a big forest, but we’ve been here a while, and she’ll start narrowing the hunt down. Especially with that wolf of hers. We have a few days at best.”
“These barrels will be enough?”
“If we can make seven of them, we’ll be able to carry enough to get us to the peak of First Lieutenant.”
“Carry?”
“In your corespace. Seven will be reaching our maximum, but it’s better than nothing.”
Vayra sat down in front of Phasoné. “Alright, then…how can I help? We’ll need to finish the barrel you’re working on, plus one more.”
“First, get yourself cleaned up.”
“Cleaned up?”
“Wash off the nectar and such with well water. There’s plenty of it—no need to worry about wasting any.”
Ten minutes later, Vayra returned, much cleaner than she was before. Everything still felt a little sticky, but it was better than nothing. She sat down next to Phasoné. “So…I, uh, I haven’t tried weaving anything. I mean, I’ve never really had time to try any of that stuff, like sewing or knitting, either.”
Phasoné chuckled. “I didn’t figure you were much of a craftsperson. How about you tear the flower petals into long, thin strips for me.”
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While Vayra worked on her mildly destructive task, she let the kitten out of the corespace so it could get a little more practice walking with its own two legs. She fed it and petted it, but eventually, it would need something to drink, and her canteen was almost empty.
Elixir it was, then.
She poured out just a droplet onto the ground in front of the kitten, and it lapped up the droplet.
Within seconds, the kitten’s eyes flared bright blue. Its ears lit up—light was pouring out of its skull—and it started to sneeze.
Vayra picked it up and started to pet it until it stopped sneezing and light stopped pouring out of its skull.
“Any more than that, and you’ll fry the poor thing,” Phasoné said.
“Sorry,” Vayra whispered to the kitten. “You’ll get used to it. Maybe.” She looked up at Phasoné. “Does it have any spirit potential?”
“Normally, I’d say ‘give me some mana and I’ll check’, but that won’t be necessary.” Phasoné didn’t even look up from her task. She had finished the sixth barrel and moved onto the seventh. “Animals work more like plants than humans, in that regard. Any of them can eventually have spirit potential. They don’t rely on knowledge and purpose for their magic. They have no core, and really, they’ll never form a proper soul. They just accumulate sheer power until their forms change.”
“Form…changes?”
“Eventually, like you saw with the nymphs, they’ll start to look more human. Once they start having a sapient understanding of their environment—which those nymphs did not, for the record—they can advance like humans.” Phasoné folded another few strands of purple flower petal under the other, moving faster than Vayra could rip them. “Speaking of which, you should probably give it a name before it gets to that point.”
“How long will it take to turn more…human?”
“Depends how much well-water you feed it. Those plants just had to absorb trickles of it through their roots to get themselves started, but if you direct it? I imagine you could have the kitten talking like a toddler in a few years.”
Vayra started ripping shreds of flowers faster. They would need to get moving sooner than later. “Alright, then. A name.” She blew a puff of air into her cheeks and sighed. Nothing came to mind right away. “Uh…Fluffy?”
Phasoné turned and stared at Vayra with a blank expression.
“Alright, no, not it,” Vayra whispered. Bremi was always better at naming things. Why hadn’t he and the other midshipmen given the kittens names yet?
“That was absolutely not it.” Phasoné turned back to her weaving. “Talock and I had a pet once, a long while ago. It was a little fell-hound—orange mottled fur, flaming tail. We never fed it much elixir, of course, but it was named Adair.”
“Adair?”
“Named after an ancient mortal admiral, though I can’t recall his exploits now. Where was I going with this…” The Goddess scratched her chin. “Ah, well, old Adair—the fell-hound—had fur that looked a lot like this little guy’s.”
Vayra picked up the kitten and held it away from her for a second. “Adair, huh? Maybe one day you’ll lead a fleet.” She shrugged, then set the kitten back down. “I’ll take it. Gotta keep the name spreading somehow.”
The kitten meowed, then ran around in a circle. Already, it didn’t seem so wobbly on its feet. Before Vayra could reach out and stop it, it pounced on the remaining droplets of golden elixir on the ground and licked them up.
“He’s already got a penchant for magical power,” Phasoné said. “You’ll get along fine.”
The next day, they finished the seventh barrel, and Vayra began to fill them all up. She dipped them down into the well and hoisted them back up, using a standard Bracing technique to strengthen her arms enough to lift and lower entire barrels of water herself.
She had to restrain herself from using the Astral Shroud; the proper, full technique only bolstered her speed, not her strength.
Once all seven barrels had been filled, Phasoné retreated back inside Vayra, and they loaded the barrels into the corespace. Vayra wrapped her arms around the barrels and clung tight to them one at a time, focussing her willpower to drag them into her core.
‘We wouldn’t have been able to carry so much outside matter before racing Second Lieutenant,’ Phasoné said, while Vayra wrapped her arms all the way around the fourth barrel and hugged it tight. ‘But now that we have a more firmed-up core, it should be a little easier.’
Vayra flashed into the corespace with the barrel and let go of it. She placed it next to the other three. Phasoné had dragged the others up to the top of the hill at the core’s center.
“So? What are we going to put in here?” Vayra asked, hauling the fourth barrel up to the center of the hill. Adair, who had been dragged into the corespace two barrels ago, ran circles around her feet, mewing at her. “Like, actually put in here, mind-like, how we built the landscape. We’re supposed to put some vegetation down. A bit of an ecosystem, if I understand what Nathariel said right.”
When Vayra pulled the barrel up to the top of the hill and shoved it in next to the rest, she wrenched herself out of the corespace, but the conversation didn’t stop.
‘A bedding of silver kagwart,’ Phasoné said. ‘It’s a great base plant, and it—’
“I…don’t know what that looks like.” Vayra walked back across the clearing to the last few barrels and grabbed another one. Her core already felt stuffed, no matter how much Phasoné assured her that she could fit all seven in (barely). It didn’t feel full like it had been stuffed with Arcara, but a different, deeping spiritual fullness. Like she had crammed a square into a circular hole, and was now suffering the consequences of it.
As she dragged the last three barrels into her core, Phasoné explained the silver kagwart: “It’s a herb, really, though it’s mostly decorative. My mother had a garden full of it, and it always shimmered beautifully at night. That’s the only significance, really.”
When Vayra dragged the last barrel into her core, and the entire center of magic felt like it was about to burst apart into thousands of pieces, Phasoné asked, “What plants would you have here?”
“I can’t say I know all that many plants,” Vayra said, leaning on the edge of one of the barrels. “Tavelle wasn’t a city for having living plants—except weeds, and I don’t want to put weeds in here.”
“I should have expected that,” Phasoné replied. Then, the eyes of the Goddess’ fully-coloured, inside-the-core body lit up with excitement. “Does that mean I get to do all the gardening?”
“If you’d like.” Vayra dropped out of the corespace one last time. She checked her surroundings just to make sure she hadn’t left anything behind, then walked to the edge of the clearing. They needed to keep moving.
‘Yes please!’ Phasoné said. ‘Oh, yes, I’d love that!’
Vayra increased her pace. They needed a place to work that wasn’t so obvious, and hopefully it was somewhere far from here—where Larra wouldn’t catch up for a long while. Vayra pushed aside the wall of flower petals at the edge of the clearing and marched out into the wilderness.