You will think you’ve discovered something new, that no one else has tried. I guarantee you, they have. They just didn’t survive testing it.
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"Is there anything more we need to take care of before we go?" Raina asked, forearms resting on the railing of the balcony. "I don't think that we can possibly be here long enough to deal with the whole fallout of what you've done."
"What, the thing with the king?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I don't plan on dealing with the fallout of that any time soon." He grinned. "Larenok will take care of it. He's ambitious and ruthless. Nothing to be concerned by."
"I feel like that's not a good reason to be unconcerned. Besides, this is Larenok we're talking about. How do you know he won't leverage your reputation to turn himself into a grand czar or something?"
Jair shrugged. "Does it matter if he does?"
Raina frowned. "Of course it does. He's a jerk."
"And he's ambitious and self-centered and doesn't care at all about convention or requirements of sanity."
"Why do you sound like those are good things?"
"They're reliable things. If he does take over the country, I guarantee he'll do a better job than Sekir."
"You really are obsessed with this Sekir guy, huh."
"He's the next major checklist item to deal with. Of course he's going to be on my mind."
"And you can't just... let it go for a while? Enjoy life?"
"That's what I'm doing. If I couldn't let go, I'd be sitting in an oasis right now. Or trying to convince you that your imprints needed to be sorcerer-killers."
"I wouldn't be opposed to some anti-sorcery spells."
"I would. It's a waste. Most sorcery can be counteracted by strength of will and a competent soul shield."
"You know that I've never even heard of a soul shield, right?"
"Yeah, they're not commonly taught. They're pretty advanced, but we've got years. Plenty of time for you to learn."
"So you want to teach me to be an archmage, and learn this soul shield technique that I've never heard of. What else?"
"We need to upgrade Tempest, naturally." He pulled out the list of potential ingredients from his soulspace. "Any of these strike your fancy?"
She stared at it, read through it quickly, turned the page over, unfolded it, scanned the list, then unfolded it another time before raising an eyebrow at Jair. "You gave me every option you could think of?"
He laughed. "No, only the best ones. And only those specifically available on Terluna or in the Oriad. If we want to roam further afield, you'll have to give me another few days to compile all the information necessary."
"You want me to decide in the next three days?"
"No rush if you don't want to. Like I said, we have years."
Raina folded the page and set it aside. Clasping her hands together, she leaned forward earnestly. "Jair, I understand that you are very enthusiastic about this. But you have to understand something. I'm not going to be able to keep up at this pace."
He waved away the concern. "It doesn't matter what your pace is. I'm perfectly capable of handling the logistics. If you want to spend the next year doing nothing but traveling, that's entirely reasonable too. I'll take one cycle to visit Nuprima and get my own archmage status back, then I'm all yours."
"We've got almost a month until a Nuprima passage."
"And until then, I'm all yours." He flashed her a brilliant smile. "I don't demand much for myself, you know."
"Just the time to become an archmage, right."
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Between shopping, meditating, packing, meditating, and sparring with a side of meditating, the week passed in steady tempo.
Terlunia arrived on the 30th with much fanfare, the lunar festival in full swing by the time the passages to Terluna itself opened in the morning.
Jair, Raina, and Lilin were at the front of the line as the first incoming eelships arrived and began unloading their goods. All the waiting passengers joined in the handoff, as was traditional. Several of the buyer's criers oversaw the delivery, and within minutes the entire load had been deposited in the waiting storage warehouse or one of the three wagons.
By the time the passengers had finished lining up, the eelship was already being led away to the next warehouse to be loaded up for the return trip.
"This'll be my first time off-world," Lilin said, both excited and nervous as they stood waiting.
"Nothing to worry about. Entirely like a normal transit, except bigger and heavier."
The platform flashed, then, and they were hurled through crushing and stretching space to a matching platform on the distant Terluna.
Lilin stumbled and would have fallen if Jair hadn't caught her.
"I didn't like that," she mumbled woozily.
Dozens of people stood around, either waiting for friends and family, or queueing up for their turn to head down. The south-central Almas passages weren't incredibly popular, but there were still enough people to make it feel crowded.
The arrival station was open to the sky, but walled around by high hedges. Eelships drifted up and down outside, as the steady flow of goods came in and went out.
Terluna didn't have nearly as much in the way of natural exports as someplace like Nuprima—where the shipment of mana crystals were the vast majority of its traffic—but as a way to transport things between continents on the planet without running afoul of the seascourge, it thrived.
"Alright, we have about eighteen hours before the passage to Orard. Plenty of time to see the sights." Jair glanced at Raina—politely interested—and Lilin—openly gaping.
"It's so green? How..."
Raina smiled. "Terluna's unrivaled in its gardens. Shall we go for a quick tour of those?"
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Raina's idea of a quick tour turned out to be three hours long and cross two thirds of the way across the moon, but the look of undeniable awe on Lilin’s face at each new discovery was worth every minute of walking around garden after garden.
They finished up at a natural courtyard formed by an ancient lunar crater whose dust had been magically compressed into a smooth stone, while the curved melted walls were overgrown with Terlunan vines whose overly-large leaves formed a canopy around the outer rim of the courtyard. The place had been turned into an open-air cafe, and that’s where they ended for lunch.
“Anyone have suggestions for what to do after?” Raina asked. “After all, we still have half a day of lunar festival to play in.”
Lilin shrugged.
“I’m flexible,” Jair said. “I'm eager to introduce you to Eythron and Qahrvirna, and to get to Nuprima to start our mage advancement, but neither of those is on a timer. We have plenty of time to play with before we need to start worrying again. Did you have something in mind?"
"As it happens, I do." Raina smiled. "Have either of you ever been storm-sailing before?"
"Is that like sandfishing?" Lilin asked.
"Only slightly. Terlunan storms are a lot tamer than Neptian ones, and they have the advantage of not being infested with seascourge. It's slightly terrifying at first, but once you get used to the idea of a vast body of water that isn't going to eat your soul, it's quite thrilling."
Thrilling was one word for it, though not necessarily in a good way. Of all the things he’d become accustomed to and lost the fear of, falling into water was not one of them. He probably never would be used to it. Repetition tended to dull the threat of just about everything, but seascourge and the star hydra stood out as major threats that could not be underestimated.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Even now, the faintest slip-up could cost him his existence. And that would cost the world a whole lot more. Given how quickly seascourge moved on a soul-destruction level, keeping that instant reflex of water=death, run was probably the most important fear he had remaining.
But Terlunan seas were secure, safe, and ostensibly fun to play around in. So he actively suppressed the parts of him that screamed he should avoid water at any cost, and followed his friend and sister toward the storm-dock.
Terlunan weather was one of those peculiar things about it that just never stopped being weird. While Neptian weather varied and fluctuated more or less unpredictably, Terluna's weather followed a very simple pattern. In these areas, it would be warm and damp. In those areas, it would be warm and dry. In these areas, it would be wet and cloudy, and in the storm seas, it would be stormy.
The storms occasionally spilled over onto the shore by a half mile or so, wind and temperature fluctuations happening as they swirled on by, but even that was in its own way entirely predictable. If they stopped by the storm center there would be a chart of how far the storms would be reaching on any given day of the coming two weeks.
Jair wasn't used to the buffeting flow of the storm beneath their slender vessel, but his balance was so incredibly attuned after uncountable years of doing everything and anything that it would have been easier to unbalance a nonizard.
Lilin lasted all of three seconds before she was tossed off the flat ship into the sea with a shriek. Raina, clearly an experienced storm-surfer, lasted almost a full minute before it got the better of her and she slipped, laughing, through the clouds below.
It was a peculiarity of Terluna's particular atmosphere that these low-lying clouds were thick enough to be used as lift beneath their ships. The turbulent water below mimicked the flowing and shifting of the storms, and made for a relatively safe landing when you inevitably lost the war for balance with the tumultuous stormtop.
The whole activity was incredibly popular with tourists. To those living someplace where water could never be trusted, the novelty of being able to fly over a lot of it and fall in without being obliterated in an instant carried that thrilling edge of danger, the forbidden. Sure, baths and ponds and even controlled streams from secure springs existed, but this was a full stormy sea.
Jair deactivated the lift and let the ship drift down through the clouds to collect his fellow passengers.
“Wha– ho– I–” Lilin was grinning and laughing and couldn’t string together a coherent thought as Jair hauled her up onto the cloudship.
Raina was laughing too as she climbed up. Her robes soaked through, hair framing her face in wet strands, but eyes bright and gleaming, delighted at the chance to share what seemed to be one of her favourite activities. “Again?” she shouted over the whipping wind and crashing waves.
Lilin nodded emphatically. Jair smiled as he shifted the ship back up through the tumultuous clouds, then set it to drift atop the roiling storm.
Lilin squealed as she clung to the central sail pole, the ship sending her first one way, then the other. She managed to hold on a few moments longer this time before she misjudged her adjustment and slipped backwards off into the storm.
Raina looked almost as comfortable with the bucking and tossing cloudship as Jair himself, adjusting her balance in constant flow and only occasionally reaching out to grab the pole.
Jair kept one hand lightly on the control interface, swaying and shifting with the chaos below. Then he laughed.
“What?”
“If this isn’t a metaphor for my life, I don’t know what is. Riding atop the chaos…” he grinned at her. “With you at my side, of course.”
“I doubt I can keep up with you long,” she said, and immediately proved her words by yelping as the ship spun in a tight circle. Only by grabbing the pole with both hands did she remain on board.
“I think you’ll surprise yourself.”
“But not you?” She grinned and released the pole, shifting back to balancing with arms out.
“You’ve already surprised me.” He waved a hand at the roiling storm beneath them. “I wouldn’t have guessed this as the first thing you run to.”
“I know I’ve mentioned it before.”
“In a list of things you’d like us to do, yes. But I’m getting the impression it’s more—”
Raina’s attention to the conversation left her off-guard as the ship bucked, and she tumbled off into the clouds with a startled yelp.
"No fair," Lilin complained as they retrieved her the third time. "I keep falling almost immediately."
"We've had more practice. Just got to keep trying."
"This is nothing like a sandskimmer."
"No, it really isn't."
"Can you... turn it to easy or something?" Lilin asked hopefully.
Jair gestured to the perpetual storm. "Does that look like something we can turn down?"
Lilin shrugged. "You're a mage, right? Can't mages control wind and stuff?"
"At the moment, I don't have any spells. You realize I only became capable of using imprints without sabotaging my class a couple weeks ago, yes?"
"And you can't wave your hands and chant the spell?"
Jair released the ascension lever and went back to lightly touching the activation input. "If you just finished learning how to build a house, should I expect you to have one completed the next day?"
"Well, no, it takes time to build something."
"Spells are the same. I can know how to do a thing, but I still need to take the time to actually do it. It doesn't matter how much I know if I don't take the appropriate actions to make use of that knowledge."
"Like teaching me to—" Lilin lost her grip and went sliding backward, flailing helplessly as she tried to regain her balance. "Help!"
Raina lunged to grab her hand, but that only meant that they both went tumbling off. Jair released the panel and let the ship drift downward.
"You could try holding hands the whole time if you think it'd help." He snickered. "Tandem balancing isn't that much harder."
Raina scoffed. "Then you do it."
"With you, or with my sister?"
"The point is to help Lilin, why would you and I be any use to her?"
Jair helped Lilin up onto the ship and started their ascent again. Mist dampened his hair and by now he'd been splashed enough that his robes were almost as thoroughly soaked as the girls who'd been swimming.
Once they reached the cloud layer, he passed off the task of holding them up to Raina, then took Lilin's hands in his.
"The key to tandem is to move very small. Much less than you think you'll need. Because there's two of us, if we both fully adjust, we'll throw things off."
Raina grinned. "Ready?" Without waiting, she flipped the lever and they dropped onto the clouds.
Lilin immediately overcorrected, nearly knocking Jair over. He had to whip out a hand and grab the pole to anchor them both.
"Slow, careful movements. Crouch slightly, lower your balance. Put your other hand out flat. Use it to guide yourself through the wind."
Lilin extended her hand, the other gripping Jair's painfully tight. He didn't mention it.
For the next several minutes, Jair kept a firm grip on the pole and continually instructed Lilin on how to shift until she was no longer throwing off his balance every second.
"I'm going to stop anchoring us now," he warned. "Don't change what you've been doing. I'll continue to adapt the same as I was before. There's no need to be concerned."
He slowly released, and she immediately overcorrected and sent them both flying off into the clouds.
Jair took a breath and adjusted his body as he fell, cutting smoothly into the water. Part of him flinched, absolutely convinced that he was about to see glowing lights of death coming toward him, but he forcefully suppressed the instinct of fear. This was a different ocean. He was safe here.
He was grinning again by the time he surfaced, treading water as they waited for Raina to come down. Lilin coughed and spluttered, but the safety construct she wore kept her from going under. He'd eschewed such a device, long since past the point where any sort of protective gear was helpful here. If he was going to drown, he could revert the timeline. Why carry around something heavy and power-hungry? A construct like that would burn through his fledgling manabody in minutes.
"You having fun?" Jair asked as Lilin waved to show Raina where they were.
"Yeah." She laughed. "I didn't ever think water could be so... exciting."
"Water is always exciting."
"Not that kind of exciting..."
"What, fear for your life and soul is excitement."
Raina arrived, interrupting their debate before he could get any further into his argument. Lilin continued to practice in tandem with Jair for another twenty minutes, with several pauses to fish them out of the water, before he switched back to controller and let Raina have a turn.
All the progress he'd made with Lilin seemed to disappear the moment she had someone else next to her. Jair had spent enough time with his sister to be able to read her quickly and coordinate his movements to match hers even if she was not so great at matching his. Raina's perpetual tumbles as Lilin dragged them both down in moments proved that it was more due to his capability than Lilin's progress.
Oops.
After the tenth time in a row that they fell almost immediately, Raina suggested they stop for lunch. No one objected, so Jair returned their ship to the rental dock and led the way to one of the more well-reviewed buffets in the vicinity.
Owned by a pair of largely feline beastkin, one with a full mane, the other with stripes on her tail and scales on her arms, the place specialized in exotic meats prepared with the kind of perfect skill that could only be obtained by a family business with generations spent improving their craft.
Jair picked out some of the spiciest stormfish and a pile of tangy tubers with a thin gravy, but held out an arm to stop Lilin when she went to imitate him. "Try the other things first," he advised. "Unless you want to be incapable of tasting anything."
"It can't be that bad."
“Oh?” He held his plate toward her.
Lilin took one sniff and nearly passed out. She backed away, coughing uncontrollably. "Okay. Yep. Ah. Maybe next time."
"Oooh, starpepper stormfish!" Raina darted over and snatched one from his plate before he could stop her. She already had a cup of creamy soup in her hand, which she dropped the spicy fish into. "Just what I wanted."
She leaned past him to spoon in a scoop of cubed boiled greenbells, filling the last of the empty space she'd left intentionally for the purpose. She stirred her soup together, breaking up the fish, then turned and scooped up more of the greenbell cubes and held them out to Lilin. "Try these, they're a lot less dangerous."
Lilin didn't protest quickly enough, and Raina dumped them on her plate.
"Hey, I wanted—"
"I'll be on the balcony." She glided away, somehow balancing her plates and bowl and cup with perfect elegance.
Lilin nudged Jair with her elbow. "You sure you don't want to marry her?"
"Hm?"
"You were staring dopily after her."
"I do not stare dopily. I was observing her mastery of balance and efficiency of movement."
"Suuuuuuure." Lilin slid down the buffet toward the less heavily seasoned meats, choosing a frosted drake-steak with a curried grain mash. "Keep telling yourself that."
Jair added another three pieces of the fish, spooned more sauce over them, and followed Raina to the balcony without deigning to reply.
That didn’t stop Lilin from giggling at him the whole time he walked away.
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