Ranvir stood with his arms out to his sides, halfway through his second step into the pocket. All around him space cried in silence. Braces, beams, and bolsters screamed. Physically, he felt nothing as the area wavered around him, the space trying to rend itself apart as his native presence broke the world around him.

After a full minute count it finally started slowing down and not because the space was falling apart, thankfully. Joinings, connections points, and load bearing constructs were ripped and torn scattered across the floor, dissipating in flickering purple sparks. It revealed the bare bone remains of the space, the core braces, the nexus points he’d put the most focus on, the bearings that could and did take the weight of his presence.

He held a hand up to Kirs, waving her off, “I don’t think it can handle anymore than this, unfortunately.”

She pursed her lips and sighed, “Too bad,” she didn’t linger overlong on the disappointment, though, instead she went right to work on her ritual, disappearing from the narrow view of the aperture.

Ranvir carefully strode further into his space. Despite him being the sole source of power and driving force behind this expression, it still buckled under his native presence. He had hopes for the future, however, as Dovar was easily able to subdue his own presence. Despite being limited to the very narrow pre-stage range around himself he could still fully submerge in smoke, where someone else would disturb their own expression as they passed through. Even if it was only a small touch on something as solid as smoke.

It was an odd feeling, walking on solid ground yet sensing it shake under your weight with every step. It did, however, reveal a few things to Ranvir as he examined the area more closely.

Vathlauss’ treaty on the creation of pocket-spaces weren’t worth much, if you weren’t already a second-stage when you made it. The generator had written pretty extensively in his retirement about his creations of such spaces, but almost nothing that Ranvir’d picked out from it worked under his far more limited scope of abilities.

Luwai’s ‘Structural Analysis of Space’ and Katla’s ‘Pockets Within and Without’ were much more in-depth explorations of the basics. Especially, Katla’s flexible corner braces were coming in useful. If Ranvir’d been stronger, he could’ve just thrown more power at the problem and it would’ve solved itself eventually. However, he wasn’t there yet and he wasn’t sure he wanted to ever get there.

Solving problems by working on them was way more satisfying. Luwai while having only a few useful tricks in their book, hadn’t been as immediately and obviously useful to him. Now that he was looking at the parts that broke and the parts that didn’t, he was realizing their analytical approach to solving the issues of pocket-spaces came in handy.

He whipped out his notebook and started writing down thoughts and potential fixes as he examined the space quadrant by quadrant. Surprisingly, something that hadn’t been as useful to Ranvir was the time with Floki and Saleema’s pocket-spaces. Sure, the simpler nexuses of supports he’d created in mimicry of theirs were immensely handy, but many other spots they were overly complicated. He couldn’t tell what exactly they were for, but he suspected they were solving solutions to problem he hadn’t come upon, yet.

A shiver ran through the first-year at the thought, he couldn’t wait to get there.

He ducked his head out through the aperture, “Es, I’m closing the space for… maybe ten minutes, if I’m not out by then, please tear it down.”

Es frowned slightly but nodded. Frija, who had a death-grip on his sleeve, nodded in an over exaggerated manner as well as she looked towards Ranvir.

“Thanks,” Ranvir ducked back into the space and brought the aperture together. Two things happened when the gateway closed. The connection point changed allowing Ranvir’s tether-sense to escape through it and Vednar blossomed before his eyes, and the entire pocket lurched slightly.

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It only took Ranvir a few moment to realize how imperfectly he’d made the aperture. While it wasn’t a weakness when it was closed, it did severely damage the integrity of the space when open.

As he dug deeper into why, something lurched in his tether manifesting as the slightest tug on his power. If he hadn’t been aware it might be coming, he doubted he would’ve ever noticed. Slight enough that he doubted most tethered could even detect it.

There was a flaw in the baseline of his tether somewhere. Something had broken, or maybe it always was, maybe it was a dissonance, or a simple flaw in his advancement to Veil. It had been pretty different from other first-stage breakthroughs he’d ever heard of. There were a few masters who’d broken through to their third-stage similarly, but no one had ever done it like that into second-stage, let alone first.

And yet, the flaw was becoming more irregular. At first, he’d noticed it every few seconds but as his advancement had settled, it had turned into tens of seconds. Now as he’d grown stronger it had become every few minutes. Ranvir knew for certain that if he advanced again, either laterally or vertically he would be covering the issue up, not solving it.

What it might mean for his future as a tethered he wasn’t sure of, but he was for sure not going to find out. He just needed the time to really dig deep into his tether. In some ways his advancement was a blessing in that the flaw was no longer so overwhelming that he couldn’t search for the solution properly, but a curse as well as it no longer felt as pressing. Before it had been shaking his tether-space apart, but now he barely sensed it buck.

Ranvir sighed and let the subject go. With Frija it was hard to find even an hour to work on something. Even this required Es babysit for him, not that his friend wasn’t happy to do it. Solving the problem with his tether was not an hour every few evenings kind of a problem, however.

Dropping the subject, Ranvir refocused on the aperture. He was startled to find how the closed connection point seemed to allow for a much more widespread examination of the local surrounding area. He could vaguely sense the entirety of his apartment and a bit of the hallway beyond it, as well as the ones next to it. He wasn’t getting any great detail, he could only barely tell that there were two people in his apartment and he couldn’t find Frija at all, her baby presence completely overwritten by Es’ adult one.

Soon, the space expanded into the entire building, surprising Ranvir by how much of it was filled with students and their partners. Some of them had multiple children old enough to be their own distinctive presences Ranvir realized with a start. Soon, those faded as well, as he got a clearer glimpse of the complex as a whole.

Masters stood out like shining moons, with two of them like suns compared to those. They were without a doubt Master Zubair and Naadiya, Ranvir hadn’t met them for long, but their strength even in his short glimpses had been undeniable and so it was here.

He started getting a stronger look on the rest of the academy and got a queasy feeling coming from the area. With this kind of perspective, Ranvir sensed a… wrongness. It wasn’t a flaw so much as it was a lack of something. He sensed that reality wanted to do something, but couldn’t for whatever reason. Vednar had a clear desire and Ranvir needed to understand what it was. He stretched his sense wider and found the world to be oddly flat. Almost bland seeming.

“Fool!” Latresekt yelled in Ranvir’s head. The creature formed in an instant, “You have no guide!” Ranvir yelped at the sudden appearance of the creature. He’d thought it had disappeared when Master Ayvir and Svenar had struck Ranvir’s native presence down. Latresekt certainly hadn’t come out of it whole. It lacked much of its mass, now solely made out of orange and red colors, though points of yellow were starting to reform as pinpricks of light glimmering distantly on its body.

Much of the orange and a portion of the red rose from it and touched down on the mental landscape of Ranvir’s mind.

Ranvir grit his teeth, sneering at Latresekt. His fingers made fists until the bones creaked. “What would you know about foolishness, creature?” The hate in the remark slipped past him unnoticed. Whether it couldn’t hear him or was ignoring him didn’t matter to Ranvir, he just felt the need to express himself.

He stomped on the ground, as heat rose in his cheeks and blossoms of angry red fire started rising all throughout his mind and body. Breathing heavily in heaving inhales Ranvir focused on his Veil, stretching it as wide as it could go, enveloping the entirety of the pocket-space.

“Ooh, big and strong,” Latresekt muttered mockingly most of its shitty excuse for a body having dissipated, and Ranvir saw red. The fires of anger turned to pillars and the creature reached through them into Ranvir’s Veil. In a split second, a maneuver so deft and fast and fluid it rivaled water, Latresekt touched the aperture and the connection. And undid the pocket-space.

Ranvir stood in the meditation room, purple space disintegrating around him. Latresekt retreated drawing orbs of red and orange from Ranvir’s mind returning to its body and leaving the anger to gutter and die.