As the days passed, the walls of the canal shrank. They dipped down low enough that the Harmony’s sails could catch the wind blowing across the canal from east to west—if they angled the sails just right, the breeze pushed them south to the ocean and back to the Stream.
They arrived at the locks halfway through the night, and the Harmony managed to slip in before the upper gate’s routine closure (but they had to wait a few more hours until the lock drained and let them down to the lower shelf of land.
While they waited, Vayra repaired her prosthetic hand. She peeled the outer panels away, revealing the damaged string tendons, wooden rods, and starsteel coils that made it all work.
Moving slowly and carefully, she pulled the debris and damaged elements out. In the three days before, she had prepared replacement components (with a little help from Nathariel and the ship’s gunsmith), but they didn’t have any extra starsteel to replace the wires. She fixed those herself. She rejoined severed wires with knots and pushed coils back into place. She rigged strings back up for the tendons and slotted wooden bones back in.
Her other flesh-and-blood hand made a perfect reference. Now that she was a Captain and her senses had improved, she could observe most of her inner workings by pushing her consciousness down through her body. She followed her Arcara channels, then let her mind seep out into her flesh and veins.
Once she had a basic blueprint of how the bones needed to align, she put the prosthetic hand back together.
When she fuelled the starsteel wires, her hand contracted and opened as it was supposed to. When, after another few hours (until the lock drained, depositing them on the bottom river), nothing else had gone wrong with the hand, she attached the panels back to the outside and socketed the runestone back in place.
As soon as she had the arm repaired, a faint rumble and a single pulse of strength radiated away from the bow of the ship.
She had been using the center of the gun deck as her makeshift workshop, but at the sound, she sprang to her feet and, weaving between sleeping sailors and scattered cargo, ran up above deck.
Glade sat on the forecastle, using elixirs to push himself far enough and high enough. He had broken through to Second Lieutenant—she knew that was what the rumble meant. He had been working towards the advancement for the past few days, using elixirs he had scavenged from the greenhouse.
Vayra ran up to the Harmony’s foremast and leaned against it, her arms crossed. “Can you hear me, Glade?”
“I hear you.”
“Just making sure everything went alright.” The Lieutenant stages had very little risk during advancement, but any moment, though, she expected him to pass out. “Are your channels still holding together?”
“Holding together,” he confirmed, opening his eyes.
Nathariel had run up the forecastle stairs to join them. He shut his eyes, probably exerting a quick spiritual scan of the deck, then nodded. “You are making good progress. We have a few weeks yet to get you to Captain.”
Vayra turned away and hung her head. Glade might have turned out to be a bit of a prodigy, but his potential was still limited, and if they failed, they’d permanently cripple him. Plus, it all hinged on him figuring out the necessary insights.
But they had no other choice.
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Glade had designed his corespace as a replica of the Elder Eman-Fa’s training pit at his home estate on the planet of Pana.
There was barely enough room in the corespace to fit the location. During Third Lieutenant, Glade had layered down a flat dish of earth ten yards across before he reached the edge of his inner void. Before reaching Third Lieutenant, he hadn’t even been able to draw himself into it, let alone adjust the corespace, but Ameena had offered a few suggestions in their last day together.
He had extended an offer for her to join them, but she had declined.
Still, the advice was helpful. He needed to create a space that meant something about swords to him. What better than the place where he had spent his entire childhood learning sword forms and sparring with his old Order of Balance teacher?
Once he had a platform of dirt, he layered gravel onto it. It was a simple, flat foundation, but it wouldn’t be a very good sparring pit if it was hilly.
Now, almost a week after reaching Second Lieutenant, and almost entirely through his elixir reserves, he had nearly completed the vegetation.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
He sat in the center of the gravel pit, asserting willpower through his core, and manipulating Arcara into strands. They wove up into tree-like shapes. Inside the corespace, he envisioned a pair of trees on either side of the pit.
One was a red maple, and the other was white. They were old trees with twisted, thick trunks, and they hung over the center of the circular patch of gravel, blotting out most of the sky. The red tree dropped its red leaves on half of the gravel patch, and the white tree dropped its leaves on the other half, covering the ground almost entirely with their two discrete colours.
As Glade neared the peak of the stage, he added tufts of grass around the edge. It was hardy grass; this training pit would have been close to the coast. His most vivid memory of this place was during the fall, so the grass needed to be going to seed.
His core had already tinted to a shade of coral-orange from the Dawnspear body, and the lighting was sunset-like. He couldn’t change that yet, though—the sky would come later.
As he was setting the last tufts of grass in place, his core gave a pulse, then it shuddered. He started pouring waves of mana through it to lock everything in place and seal the changes he had made.
When his core stopped shaking and shuddering, and the new formations of Arcara he had asserted were finally in place, he opened his eyes and drew his consciousness back outside. His Arcara channels burned. They felt like a musket whose barrel had burst, except there was no muzzle, and the burst bore had to hold together still. It still had to fire another volley.
He took a break, shaking his arms, but it didn’t make the spiritual sting go away. He wanted his channels to just shred and be done with it. That’d be a relief of some kind.
The Harmony had made it out onto the open ocean now. Wind filled the sails, and they took a direct route—as direct as the wind would let them—to the Stream.
He hadn’t exactly been paying attention over the past few days, but Vayra and Nathariel had been keeping a close watch on their surroundings. Nathariel was teaching Vayra to trust her spiritual senses more, and how to use them to greater effect. They’d only had to scare off a single crew of God-heirs who had thought the Harmony looked fancy enough to try to capture (it did look fancy enough, but that was beside the point).
Now that Glade had reached Second Lieutenant, he was entirely out of elixir. He’d have to accumulate Arcara the hard way, by drawing in mana from Stream water and purifying it with the Burning Flame Loop.
But, just when he began to descend down a ladder on the outside of the hull, trying to get low enough to the water to dip his hands in and catch a wisp of Stream water, Vayra’s shadow appeared at the top of the ladder.
“You’re going to have a hard time just taking from the Stream,” Vayra said. “Especially with that low spirit potential of yours.”
She was right, and he hated it. He just couldn’t draw in as much mana as fast as others could. He would never make it to Captain in time for the tournament—not that way.
“If you have any suggestions,” he said, “I would be open to them.”
“In fact, I do! Get back up here.”
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Vayra pulled the elixirs she had gathered from the upper dome of the greenhouse out of her corespace—all except one. They were all raw Arcara-infusion elixirs, and they would be more useful in his hands than in hers. She’d already used one to fill herself up with enough Arcara to use all her techniques reliably and continually (barring mana shortages), and she was the one with the strongest spirit potential of them all. She didn’t need to horde, not when so much was on the line.
She set the elixirs—glowing turquoise, gold, and violet decanters—down in front of Glade. “Take these, and use them as fast as you can without ripping yourself apart.”
“Vayra, these…are very, very valuable,” he said softly. “You would let me have them?”
They sat on opposite ends of the quarterdeck, facing each other. She nodded then pushed them over to him. “If not for the sake of the galaxy, for the sake of giving back to people who have helped me.” She grimaced. “Look, Glade, you’ve always been there. We’ve always climbed together, and we’ve never really been apart for too long these past few months. We need to keep rising together now.”
Phasoné mumbled something inside Vayra’s head. ‘If that’s how you feel about him…’
Pardon? Vayra thought.
‘I’d understand if you had romantic inclinations towards him,’ Phasoné said.
You can read my mind. You know it’s not that.
‘Your mind is a jumbled mess in that department.’
Phasoné radiated a mixture of emotions. Vayra couldn’t pick out all of them yet, but through their bond, she picked up a little embarrassment (from Phas, even?) and…was that jealousy?
Just longing.
“I am happy to hear you say that, but…” Glade scratched the back of his head nervously. “This is not a romantic gesture, is it?” He sighed. “Vayra, with all honesty: you are a wonderful friend, but I could not return such feelings.”
Vayra stood up and walked over to him. She put her hands on her hips and looked down on him. “Glade, are there only two options? That people are a big jerk to you, or that they’re madly in love?”
He chuckled. “Apologies, but I have never received a gift like this. Ever.”
“Figured. Neither have I.” She tucked her hands behind her back, then turned around. Looking back, if she’d received something like that from Glade, she probably would have had a similar reaction. “But you’re my friend, and that’s what a friend should do.”
He hopped to his feet. “Thank you.”
That had to be a good thing. She and Glade caught each other in another tight hug, and her eyes began to sting. A tear rolled down her cheek. “I’ve never had a proper friend before.”
“You have one now,” he said gently.
She pulled away from him slowly and nodded. “Yeah, you too. Now…you have some elixirs to process. Don’t destroy yourself before we even get offworld.”
He smiled. “I will try.” Then, he crossed his arms. His voice barely a whisper, he said, “Now, Vayra…I can guess what Phasoné has been saying to you. You have progress to make, too, and you know what to do.”