Ruyo thought carefully about the "good meal" and ended up finding a restaurant that wasn't likely to get her criticized for elitism. The fare was simple vegetables, mostly, with beer and bread in a different style than she was used to. She waved off an invitation to dine with the nobles, though she'd have to do that before leaving town, and just got a private room for her friends.

Tamur the scarred wanderer managed to talk while stuffing his face. "We've hardly seen you."

Elly said, "Yeah, we've been helping out where we can but it's not much more than random travelers could do. Think I at least talked them into building me a shrine."

Ruyo was glad to take her mind off the work. "How has the dream magic been going?"

"I'm not sure how much I'm inventing it or discovering something that was just dormant. Can't demonstrate it here but back in Starshore people are telling each other they had vivid, shared dreams."

One of the westlanders said, "Popular with couples especially, I bet."

Elly blushed. "Yeah. It's good advertising. But that's a field of spellcraft that I'm not sure has real uses besides fun. Not like your item making."

Ruyo groaned and leaned back in her chair. Nusina answered for her, "I had to pummel her with glaciers and raging hurricanes to make her quit casting the same damn spell a thousand times over."

"Have you tried making raw flour, by the way? Or vegetable stuff that isn't in bread form."

Ruyo said, "Not much. I'll try more variety soon but not tonight. Oh, I've requested a special day of prayer in two days; want me to ask if your followers can do the same for you?"

Nusina said, "That high-tide effect won't help her yet. She needs at least one shrine beyond the most basic level."

Elly said, "That'll probably be at Brotherhood. They went with a basic emergency one, which is of course decorated to please my four shadows." She cocked her head toward the main restaurant room, where two of her guards were on duty. Presumably that first shrine praised Elly the Slayer of the Light God, the single-purpose tool that Brotherhood's monks wanted.

That notion offended Ruyo more, now. "I'm glad that you're doing the dream thing on your own."

A westlander said, "Why are they so intent on stalking you, Lady Elly?"

"Sorry, but I can't talk about it yet."

"What, do they want you to slay some giant monster with your dark powers?"

Elly laughed nervously. "Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies."

Ruyo said, "Drop it, please, and don't spread rumors. We can probably tell you the whole story someday."

#

The next day, Ruyo handled her social obligations to hang around with the city's upper crust. Together they worked out a way to help her shepherd one of the ships trapped in the harbor safely past the remaining wreckage. That was kind of fun: using an upward current and a lot of coordination with Nusina to prop the hull up and keep it safe. Elly sat with her on a boat and had an idea: conjuring some of her shadow-stuff and using it like padding for hulls in danger of scraping obstacles. After a little experimenting she learned to combine it with smooth ice from Ruyo's powers. "Black ice!" Elly said.

Afterward, they tried creating the combined material along a floor. Dangerously slippery! Elly's guards were pleased to see Elly doing something they considered combat-related, even if it couldn't directly slay their enemy.

Partly for fun, Elly tried shaping bolts of nightfog like arrows and firing them from her bow. They had about as much effect as one would expect from high-speed pillows. But they did splash against a target in an interesting way that would make for fine sport. "And maybe I can adjust the color for fun, or make the stuff more solid."

Ruyo did end up conjuring more food but made a point of varying it more than usual, trying some new flavors and textures. Pure flour, a meaty broth she'd struggled with before, pork jerky, a loaf that looked and tasted nearly like a fish filet, and beer that Tamur politely judged tolerable. Her followers back in Wellspring would hopefully appreciate the novelty.

Stolen novel; please report.

She also practiced with Nusina by sticking her head into a big glob of water and trying to breathe it while working other magic. It was awful, like half drowning again and again while trying to tie her boots. Nusina pushed her to try it a couple of different ways, though. Ruyo floated in a big water ball and tried to move it with herself inside. That was somewhat more successful, though it could only scoot along the floor or barely up a wall.

"Hey, you can finally get down to the bottom of the Wellspring on your own!"

#

The next day around noon, her many followers did as asked. Across the southlands from Brotherhood in the west to Starshore in the east and at several other sites, people gathered and sent up prayers for the Lady of Waters. Ruyo was sitting quietly in the slightly furnished top floor of her temple when it happened.

Elly watched intently through the waves of blue light that engulfed Ruyo. Ruyo paid her no attention. She focused inward on the spiritual reflection of this building and of her own powers. They stood out around her as though she sat on a windy lake full of ice pillars jutting up around her.

"Do you see?" said Nusina, appearing beside her.

"It's different from before. More complex." This seascape had only a cloudy haze for a sky. "Feels more defined."

"Can you move around in it?"

Ruyo had always just sat there while viewing this reflection of herself. She stood up, the motion feeling dreamlike, and turned around. "Am I moving around in reality?"

"No. You're learning."

She walked around the crystal spires, seeing them from all angles now. Her feet splashed just below the surface. "Is it that shallow, or am I just floating?"

"You tell me."

She tried getting down on her hands and knees as though on a solid floor, and pressed her face beneath it. She didn't need to hold her breath in this unreal space, but she gasped. All of the ice towers extended far, far below like the fingers of a hand. The world below was a murky cave, then a bright reef, then a mass of shipwrecks, as though the seascape were unsure of itself. One pillar in particular had gone nearly barren and square while others had the complex facets she was used to seeing.

"That too-smooth one is the item-making power," she said.

Nusina studied it, diving below the surface. "Seems that way. What will you do here?"

Ruyo stood once more on the water. She had studied more magical theory lately and had plenty of practical experience while pushing the limits of what the scholars thought was possible. Now that she had this more mobile perspective she could see her abilities differently. "This tells me all my powers are connected, even the seemingly unrelated ones. Branches of the same tree. Is there some common root connecting all the elements?"

"I'm not sure. This space is partly real, partly a reflection of your assumptions and expectations."

Ruyo pouted. "There's not much real knowledge to gain by staring longingly into the mirror."

"No, but you've got some authority to define it to be whatever you want, and a tide of energy to spend."

In the pocket dimension used by the Night God in his lost tapestry, visitors had wielded the power to reshape local reality. It was real enough in there that she'd killed a man. She touched several of the pillars, feeling their cold edges and sensing how each one was a type of spell, a frozen waterway for her brand of mana to enter reality in various ways. "Why frozen?" she mused. "Maybe because I'm used to learning spells in specific patterns. But I've gone over some of them with multiple teachers who had their own slightly different techniques. So a basic water-shaping spell can go like this, or like this..." She conjured a ball of water and twisted its magical substance in several different casting styles.

Nusina said, "You could likely get greater flexibility and efficiency by focusing on where the pattern needs to work in one way, and where it doesn't."

Ruyo compared the item-making power and how it had felt to cast mechanically, repetitively, versus testing it out on new materials. She touched its matching pillar and it cracked and melted, becoming a flexible slush. Her shapeshifting and healing branch responded the same way, then the raw water-sculpting. Finally she came to the frozen stream she'd paid little attention to lately. "Elementals. These were a big part of what set off everything! The cultists kidnapped Virid over his little rock creatures, then ignited the city with their blazing cats. All I've got are waterballs and icy porcupines."

"What would you want a greater elemental to do?"

"Some fighting would be helpful. But help with water manipulation would be good too, for tasks like smashing those wrecked hulls or carrying people."

Nusina floated in front of her. "Well, you did once suggest I should carry around a utility octopus..."

Ruyo snorted. "Vetoed. How about a dolphin style for this one?"

Nusina approved. Together they began shaping mist into a prototype, a full-sized dolphin like a continually crashing wave. The pattern of mana for building it was a bit crude, inefficient and rigid, but they worked through how to construct it and watched it move, flowing through the hazy air.

Ruyo said, "I've never gotten to cast something this way, building it out from here."

"You're beginning to get into the advanced stuff, milady. Still within human ability, but you're pushing the limits."

"No. We are, not just me."

Nusina burbled. "Do you think you have the energy to raise the Initiation power while you're at it? We could --"

The dream rippled around them, then rumbled and shattered.