> The determinants of imbuement foci are complex. Laypeople are prone to argue from positions of personal account and anecdote, promoting one theory at the expense of others as if the process mechanism was zero sum. The disciplined mind makes study of the fullness of evidence. A sober evaluation reveals three mechanisms with documented evidence.

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> The first, necessity. Imbuements occur at moments of personal risk or through significant adversity to assist the bearer through their trial.

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> The second, proximity. Continuous exposure to other foci, or their effects, predisposes imbuements that resemble those foci.

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> The third, inheritance. Children are inclined to develop foci that resemble those of their parents. Even when they are raised apart or the foci are of an unusual nature, this tendency towards familial inheritance has been observed.

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> Principles of Imbuements: An evidence based discussion. Pre-Fall Restricted Text.

Jack had no time to think and evaluate the cards that had suddenly snapped into coherence. He played first one, and then the other, revelling in the sensation. From the second card a feeling of...capacity...of unfulfilled potential blossomed in his mind. He could only imagine it as an empty vessel that awaited its solution, and then there, another, like an echo of the first.

There was no time to linger in the feeling, he was still falling. Jack dashed, using one of his charges, to the ground. The instant he struck the ground the vessels resting in his mind filled in unison, and an awareness of capacity blossomed. They had been primed and awaited only activation.

He had landed amidst the hivers, creatures that lacked the capacity for startlement over his sudden arrival. He had only just touched the rooftop when he was beset by them. Jack ducked a hurried slice from a warrior, backpedalling to the edge of the sloped roof even while the grotesques fell over themselves to swarm him.

Nothing in his known repertoire would save him, but those two pools of energy sang a siren's song of untapped possibility. Examining the feeling they carried, Jack sensed a definite orientation to the feeling they carried, a vector carried in his mind that extended out from his feet and into the ground. The next would be a gamble, but somehow he knew that success awaited him.

Pivot. Jack spun himself forward until, inverted, he rested on a single hand, body stretched like a needle ready to pierce the sky. His useless arm was no help but the activity of Pivot kept him balanced for the moments he needed to align his direction perfectly upward.

Jack released the energy of the first vessel. In an instant he was shooting upward; as fast as he had fallen with the dash, he now traveled upside down, up into the air. He watched the hivers collapse onto the spot he had vacated, crashing upon each other in a frenzy of frustrated violence. His distance grew and the creatures shrunk in his view, receding into specks as his momentum sent him higher and higher. The tower rushed by next to him, and then suddenly he passed its top, barely slower than he started; he still climbed into the air. The tower shrank as he rose, diminishing in his vision until finally he crested at nearly triple its height.

The world stretched out before him. The clamouring of the hiver mandibles was overtaken by the whistling of rushing wind, which slowly faded into a perfect silence and lofty solitude. The moment of odd calm, as his upward rush decelerated and then finally reversed as the earth's pull reclaimed him, was broken only by the triumphant call of a nightbird lost in the distance.

Jack faced his new position with wonder and apprehension. He had escaped one challenge, but been thrust immediately into another.

The altitude exposed the dash's weakness. Jack was already beginning to fall and would only accelerate. There was a short window in which he could use the dash. Too early and he would merely accelerate to his terminal velocity, and strike the ground at lethal speed; too late and the reaction time required became impossibly swift. Not to mention that his current trajectory terminated back among the hiver swarms.

Jack's mind raced, considering and dismissing options in rapid succession. He only had the slimmest amount of experience with his new cards and could make no assumptions about their larger viability. Hoping the new card had some kind of protective effect seemed dangerously foolish to him–it did not fit with the established dynamics of his cards in the slightest.

The preoccupation of his mind was not without penalty; he had now fallen twenty meters, the tower growing once again to dominate his view.

Using his remaining 'vessel' of energy to launch himself away from the city was tempting, but the distance required didn't seem feasible and did nothing for his inevitable reunion with the ground.

Forty-four meters, nearly half the height he originally claimed.

Finally he settled on a course of action, the only path that seemed like it had a chance of success. In his mind there were two possibilities, one was a definite loss... but the other...

At seventy meters Jack acted, instantly angling his feet slightly towards the tower that he was now equal to and triggering the second 'charged vessel'. His perceptions screamed in protest at the sudden reversal of direction as he was once again thrown upwards into the air, but to his unbridled joy at a much slower rate—the power of the second use had been diminished by his existing momentum.

Almost gently he was buoyed up and above the hiver watchtower, where the second his dash-shadow touched its top he dashed safely to the roof of the structure, far out of reach and beyond the senses of any of the hivers below.

Jack lay upon the gently sloped roof, heart still racing from the experience. A careful peek over the edge of the tower revealed the hivers in disarray, engaged in a milling search for his person. Their modest eyesight and humbler minds had failed to track his escape.

He pulled back from the edge and perfectly centred himself on the top of the tower, laying back to look up at the sky he had only just left.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Jack wanted to laugh, to caper and scream himself hoarse. It was not the time yet. He settled for a spasmodic thrashing of limbs, and a pinched exhale in imitation of a shout. Exuberant exultation deferred for now, he merely grinned at the void.

Jack had secured a sanctuary and resolved his broken cards, against all odds. The similarity to his first carding and the moment the lost pair corrected didn't escape him. His thoughts swelled with the desire to discuss it, to examine the implications and speculate about the nature of carding it implied. He wanted to talk late into the night with Neavie, bouncing ideas back and forth in speculation. He wanted to bring his findings to his mother and receive the piercing insights of her sharp mind. He wanted to see Stroph, to tell him how his own cards had been fixed and plan how they might fix Stroph's. He wanted to tell Grant and hear his sober evaluation, to benefit from his wealth of experience. He wanted, he was surprised to find, to share it with Calre, who had shown such delight upon seeing Pivot and offered useful suggestions without prompting.

The desires of a life he had nearly given up on thrilled him. Hotly anticipating that future, he looked to the cards he had unlocked.

Something strange had happened when he'd played them. Two cards, yet he'd only received one effect, twice over. He had his suspicions confirmed when he meditated on the cards' feeling of function. They both had a feeling of incompleteness to them, a feeling of conditional requirements.

The first, as he focused, gave a feeling of requiring a sudden change of movement. That it would... take unused energy. This fit with what he'd experienced. It had been incomplete until he'd dashed down, and then the energy of his landing—usually lost through the mysterious mechanism of cards—was captured until he saw fit to release it again. It synergised excellently with Gotcha Dash. That card possessed overwhelming power, but was deeply inflexible. This new card gave him versatility with that power. The energy of a ten meter dash had sent him over a hundred meters into the air in an instant. There was danger in it, just as all his cards seemed to possess drawbacks. The margin of safety on his dash couldn't handle the speed of his fall from those heights, it would have been unusable without some way to halt or slow his fall.

The second card solved that problem neatly and opened up possibilities he could barely even begin to wonder at. The feeling it gave was a requirement for another card to be played. A meta card that enhanced, perhaps doubled, the next card played. It had in truth been the first card he'd blindly played, followed by the other. Pure luck. The opposite result could have been disastrous. He pieced together the order of events. He'd played the doubling effect, followed by the absorbing card, then dashed down and received two charges of the absorbed energy. Enough to send him up, and then reverse the momentum of his fall at a critical point as well.

He itched to learn how it worked with his other cards. Everything required retesting, new evaluations of possible cross-synergies and conditional card-play-orders. The interactions between this card and the cards he had and any future cards he might receive, created a plethora of new possibilities. He had come to the wilds seeking power, and this card seemed the beginning of exactly that.

Jack shivered suddenly as a lofty breeze chilled his bare form. He looked down at himself and felt a surge of nausea. What had overtaken him in the last hour? He had been deranged, violent, and irrational, yes... but also frighteningly effective. There were a dozen points where he should have flinched, where his fears or the extremity of his actions should have dissuaded or delayed him. None of it had slowed him in the slightest. Anyone watching his actions might have confused him with a noble.

The thought, an idle fancy, suddenly resonated and a flurry of isolated facts aligned in his mind.

'I remember where I encountered the taste of apples. Grant's serum, not dead hivers. How could I forget?'

What he'd thought had been an aroma of the hivers had been the taste of the vial, overwhelming or... supplanting the stench of violence and death. It had overtaken his mind as well, strained by the necessity of what he had to do. It had removed his compunctions and made him capable of whatever it took to survive. Grant couldn't have anticipated how events had unfolded, but the serum had no doubt saved Jack's life. Now that the effect had passed he could look back on what he'd done with horror and a faint awe.

'One dose, and it changed me that much for a time.'

The cost had been high, but necessary. For those that took it habitually, Jack shuddered at how they might be changed, the grooves worn into their minds by the horrors they encountered made mundane.

Gradually, his thoughts drifted to practical concerns. Hunger lent his fatigued limbs a faint tremor, thirst a burgeoning headache and dry, cracked lips. The heat of the day was approaching and he lacked any shelter, even the bare minimum of clothing, to protect him from the sun. His options were few. He needed to either convene with the nobles, of whom he'd seen no sign except the butchered bodies of their martial efforts, or make a solo escape.

The latter was... risky. The hivers had clearly been more prepared for their arrival than they'd anticipated. Pit traps, extensive underground construction, far greater numbers kept in reserve. This whole region could be trapped. Jack had developed some mobility, but he was unpracticed in its use, he could easily be injured or killed through his own inexperience. Even if he managed to escape, the caravan was at risk, the hivers would endeavor to destroy the threats that had killed so many of them, it was in their nature to react to threats with overwhelming violence. No... he needed to find the nobles, and what better location to look for them than the highest point in the landscape?

Jack looked out over the hiver city and looked for any signs that the nobles had surfaced. The confusion his flight had wrought was still evident, and the dead hivers he'd left in his wake were only now beginning to be gathered into the corpse piles he could see coalescing around the city. As he continued to watch, a pattern slowly made itself clear. Hivers continuously trickled from the underground in a steady flow of modest numbers, but their surfacing was immediately followed by them beginning to coalesce towards the same locations, growing into a swarm, before returning beneath the city. There were two such draw points that he could discern, each of them drifting slowly along.

He realized that he was watching the trail the nobles blazed beneath the earth when the bodies of hivers were inevitably brought up in several minutes behind the traveling nexuses—the residue of their fighting in the tunnels.

The number of dead surfacing were too few relative to the numbers pouring in. The hivers weren't dying en masse, they weren't even necessarily crushing the nobles beneath their weight. There was a continuous inflow of hivers to harangue them, giving them no time to rest, boxing them in and driving them to exhaustion.

Once a noble moved on, the hivers would resurface and cut them off again, dragging their dead with them. This whole edifice, the whole city was a trap designed to contain and kill those with cards too difficult to face head on. They created the most adverse conditions, and then won a war of attrition.

Jack continued to watch, growing more nervous as the nobles failed to surface. Finally a change, a swelling mass of hivers erupted around one of the nexuses, a rolling rabble that followed some central point that was creeping along to the tower.

Finally, the focus of the hivers revealed itself–a group of hivers, a caste he hadn’t seen before, taller than the workers but more lithe than the warriors. They marched with greater precision, coordination than the roil around them, shoving away those that came too close and forming a tight unit around a central, carried figure.

Jack felt his throat tighten when he could finally see what they held as the group passed underneath the tower. Vasala, unmoving, one arm broken and askew, dangling limply. Hiver claws gripped every working limb and finally held her about the throat as they moved her within the tower.

Any lingering hope for noble rescue left him as no more than a minute later another swell came from the remaining nexus of the hiver’s efforts. He knew what was coming, but watched anyway as Calre and Grant were similarly brought within the spire.