I found myself in Alatea’s office as I went to visit her to heal all the damage the sparing against the Ceaseless Storm had done on my body. But to my surprise, when I opened the door there was another person besides Alatea in the room.

“Oh, hey Edrie!” An enthusiastic Kirielle saluted me with a teacup in her hand. “Long time no see!”

“Same, Kirielle.” I saluted back to the mind healer and tutor. “I’m afraid I had my hands tied up these last days to give you a visit.”

“No problem, no problem.” She said with a smile as she patted me on the back. “Alatea has had me left alone more times than you can even imagine. At least you, unlike someone I know, visit me.”

“You know I’m right here, right?” Alatea sighed.

“Yeah, that’s the idea,” Kirielle added with a mocking tone.

“If it upsets you this much the fact that I don’t go to see you, why don’t you come to visit me?”

“And what am I doing right now, girl?” The neuromancer shouted in disbelief and betrayal, though that was the exact reaction Alatea had expected with her quip.

“I expected to come to a healing place, not a circus.” Alatea and Kirielle looked at me with hate as I finished talking.

Yup, a circus. Though I admit I was a bit of a clown myself.

“Why have you come here, if not to insult us, Edrie?” Alatea asked with feigned annoyance.

“I fear I’m in need of a great healer.” I bowed down to her.

“What have you done now?” Alatea expressed with a total lack of emotion, having had enough of my crap. Apparently. She took a sip of her infusion.

“I may have sundered my body fighting the Ceaseless Storm,” I replied.

Alatea spat out the beverage. “You what?”

“Oh, dear. I have to hear this story.” Kirielle said with an amused expression. “Not every day you listen to something like this.”

The different reactions of both healers were a case worth of study. Whereas Alatea had a panicked face as she examined me, Kirielle simply found it funny and had her back laid on her pillow. How were these two best friends?

“Don’t leave me waiting with the expectation,” Kirielle commented. “Come on, spit it out. I want to hear all about your fight.” She said smugly.

I gave Alatea an inquisitive look, to which she responded with a sigh. I’m not a master of non-verbal communication, but mystics do have the ability to talk with their souls. I took that as a yes.

I didn’t tell Kirielle everything. Yes, I told her about the leyline and the whole draconid situation, but I purposely avoided talking about my past. We were friendly, but not that close. In a way, I risked a lot explaining my special case to Alatea and Marissa. I could only be happy about how the whole ordeal ended.

I also took advantage of the moment and filled Alatea with the soldier shenanigans.

“Let me get this straight,” Alatea caressed her temples, “you fought the second strongest ellari alive, survived, and then he recruited you to be his knight?”

“A few things wrong in that statement,” I said after taking a sip from my cup. “It wasn’t a fight, but spar. Fynn didn’t go all out, I would be dead otherwise. And I am a soldier, not a knight. I fear times of chivalry are far gone. I believe it’s an order just in name.”

“You know,” Kirielle was laying around on the cushion, toying with her hands, “Alatea and I are of the eleventh star, but I doubt the two of us could even stand before the Ceaseless Storm.” The neuromancer gave a look I couldn’t quite decipher. “But we are both healers, you have far more fighting experience than the two of us combined.”

“How are you so sure that you don’t stand a chance against him?” I asked her. “Have you met him?”

“Oh, sweet Edrie.” Kirielle’s smile appeared predatory as she rose her back up from the pillow. “How many eleven-star mages do you think there are in Ferilyn? We are destined to meet at one point or another.”

“So, you met him.” My expression remained deadbeat, not giving her pleasure.

“You are no fun, you know it?” She dropped back to the pillow with an audible fall. “Fynn Albeyr is a force to reckon with, I can’t even comprehend how you have befriended him after even telling me what you did. Truth be told, I understand it even less now.”

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“Befriend is too strong of a word,” I said.

“That isn’t what matters now.” Kirielle turned to look at me. “What matters is that you are now in the big leagues, boy. How many people can say that they have survived the Ceaseless Storm? Not a lot, mind you.”

Kirielle’s gaze was enchanting, and it would have been even more so if I didn’t know she was trying to manipulate me with mind magic. It was a subtle compulsion, but I could detect it. She was the person who taught about them in the first place.

Yet my sights were far wider now, and I obtained new information from that exchange. Kirielle was using a dominion-type spell, though instead of manifesting on the corporeal plane as it did with the eleventh star electromancer, this dominion lay hidden on the cognitive plane.

Even though I couldn’t see it, I could feel its presence thanks to my own dominion. Way back then, Kirielle had used the same compulsion against me. And back then I didn’t even know what dominions were.

I dispelled her compulsion. She gave me a tantalizing smile.

The mentalist loved to toy with people even if she didn’t have malicious intentions. Kirielle just found it amusing.

“Ehem.” Alatea cleared her throat, ending our non-verbal exchange. “If you are done, you can go back to your little office, Kirielle.”

“Yes, yes.” The neuromancer stood up with a jump. “Though I won’t tolerate that flagrant denigration. Our offices are the same size.”

Kirielle left the room, opening and closing the door with her very mind, not even bothering to say goodbye. I couldn’t deny that was a very Kirielle thing to do.

“So… I understand you need me to patch you up,” Alatea told between sighs, one before and another after talking.

“Yes.” I nodded. “I don’t even know how my body is even tolerating this mistreatment.”

“Shut up and lay down.” It would seem Kirielle and I had worn the woman’s plentiful patience with our antics.

Oh well, Alatea looked cute when she frowned her brows, so I just laid down back where Kirielle was moments ago without giving it much thought. The pillows were still warm.

“You know that I should be charging you for all of this, right?” Alatea added stoically. “My tariffs are quite high because of my caliber as a healer.”

“You are too warmhearted to charge your disciple.” I smiled at her. Which in response she assaulted me with a soul cantrip. “Ouch.”

“You are going to drop dead on your feet at any moment if that hurt you.” Alatea sighed. “How can have you even hurt your soul this much?”

“Diving a leyline, fighting two ten-star mages, going to the underworld, defying a noble house’s patriarch, sparring against the Ceaseless Storm.” I recapitulated. “There are a lot of places where I got hurt, Alatea.”

“What’s that about a patriarch?” She inquired, looking me dead in the eyes.

“Yeah, let’s forget about that.” As I had forgotten to even mention that to her. I also wanted to erase the Nay’s clown fiesta from my memory.

“Edrie.” The healer pressured.

“It doesn’t matter, really.” I reiterated. “Just a minor bump on the road.”

“Why do I even bother…” Alatea sighed once more. “I’m going to induce sleep on your body to heal it better.”

“Alright.” I closed my eyes, ready for the spell to come.

The transition was painless and instant, soon my consciousness drifted from the corporeal plane.

**********

I couldn’t stay loathing around, though. There were a lot of things on my mind to just sleep through the treatment. Taking advantage of this free time, I directed my attention toward my bisected soul.

Space worked unproperly on the spiritual plane, so with a blink-long step I arrived at my other soul. How many hundreds of kilometers had I traveled with a single step I couldn’t tell. But I could guess that many.

The arcane tempest that my broken soul had become raged as intensely as before. And as much as I was bewitched by the spiritual representation of a leyline, I was equally frightened.

How could my soul become this hostile to my very existence?

I dodged the arcane-laden tornadoes, searching for the eye of the storm, only to find none. This… chaos was decentralized, homogenous, and overall, impossible.

The stray wind currents were blue, the raindrops pink, and the violet-purple storms danced around the white background. All the colors of mana appeared before me in an ordered yet simultaneously spontaneous mess.

I was metaphorically drenched in the pink water, as it looked like the most inoffensive and less mana-charged part of the storm.

As the water touched my soul, I felt invigorated. Pure mana. Yet it wasn’t raw. If it was, I would be recoiling from the pain as I did back on the leyline. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but somehow, the mana had adapted to my own mana signature.

I tried my luck with the wild blue wind currents, but I was promptly hurt by power incarnate.

Yup. That was painful.

I casted Invigorate, a lesser version of Regeneration but which affected the soul more than the body. The cracks that the wind inflicted on my soul slowly regenerated but didn’t fully close.

That doesn’t look good.

Alright, pink mana has lower intensity therefore it has been able to shift to my mana, but blue and higher-colored mana types remained raw. I can work with that.

Even if the water mana was pitiful compared to the ravaging storm, it was still far more than my two mana pools combined. That’s the unmatched power of a leyline for you.

Yet even with these incomprehensible amounts of arcane mana on my soul, I wasn’t able to tap into such power. My control over the severed soul was nonexistent. I could detect it, I could travel to it, damn it, I could even enter it, but it wasn’t technically my soul anymore. This was an anomaly I wasn’t qualified to deal with.

Maybe, and that's a big maybe, Alatea could do something with it, but I doubted she could intrude into this broken soul, or even want to do it. I could hardly access it, and it had once been my soul.

If I were an eleven-star mystic I could, perhaps, overwhelm the soul and absorb it back on my own. But even with Mystic’s Dominion, as a low ten-star mystic, I couldn't pull it off. I wasn’t there yet.

But before I could try to search for alternative ways to tap into the concentrated leyline, I noticed the two spectators looking at the mana capacitor. A red and black behemoth and a shining white whisp.

My soul materialized on the corporeal plane.