Kirs quickly put the ruler close to the freely hanging cut. Ranvir saw tiny pieces of wood shavings fall to Es’ hand as it accidentally touched the generated warp. He could tell from her face that she’d seen it, too.

She gathered her information and pulled back. They waited patiently for Esmund’s control to run out. The first quiver in the hanging blade appeared. By Ranvir’s count, they were getting close to two minutes deep.

Esmund was just show signs of weariness. The quivering grew intense until the hanging blade was vibrating so hard it almost seemed to make a sound.

Suddenly, it exploded into a spark of tiny brilliantly colored cuts that flickered and died in less than a heartbeat. Everyone let out a gasp and Ranvir released a breath of air he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. A mix of deep purple fear swirled with a haze of brilliant whites, yellows, and oranges of awe.

“1 minutes and-” Kirs cleared her throat. “41 seconds, measuring 4,4 centimeters.”

4,4 centimeters! Ranvir staggered a step back, the sphere of his emotions quivering with the disturbance of the surprise. He’d known Es was ahead of him, but having it quantified felt different.

Esmund took in a long breath, stretching his arm straight. “My longest cut.” His voice held familiar tones, but with an alien calm to them.

Kirs counted him down and he generated the cut. It was visibly longer than Grev’s who’d made the second biggest. Wood splintered as Kirs held the ruler close to the cut. It jerked from her hand and she dropped with a hiss, pulling back.

Ranvir noted Sansir’s eyes going to the stick, so Ranvir went over to Kirs. “You okay?” He whispered, as their tall friend lined the stick up from some distance. It wouldn’t exactly be a clear measurement, but it would be far better than no information at all.

“It cut me.” Kirs replied, cradling her finger. Her pointer finger was wetting the others in its blood. It was a familiar sight to Ranvir, as he was sure it would be to anyone who’d apprenticed at a workshop with lots of sharp objects. Hell, both he and Sansir had scars on their fingers from when a hand slipped.

“It’s probably not that bad, but I’m going to take you to get it looked at.”

“No, no.” Kirs waved him off as he pulled her away. “I want to stay, see this through. I just need something to staunch the bleeding.”

Ranvir nodded, looking around the field. But he’d brought nothing that could be used as a bandage.

“Here.” Sansir said. He’d put down the ruler, scarred from Esmund’s power, and was pulling off his uniform coat and the white undershirt. Ranvir rarely wore his undershirt because of the intense heat this summer. Though figuring out why an ice tethered might want to have an extra layer of clothing underneath their uniform wasn’t that hard.

He offered Kirs the undershirt. She nodded in appreciation and wrapped it around her hand entirely. Thankfully, it was her left hand, so she could still write and just hold her notebook with her improvised bandage.

Ranvir nodded to Sansir, who trying to sort his uniform out after throwing off it so recklessly. “Thanks for the help. Did any of you get the time?”

Sansir shook his head. So did Grev and Kirs. Ranvir paused when he noticed the way Grev eyes lingered on their quick acting friend as he sorted out the black uniform coat.

“Aww man.” Esmund complained. “Will I have to do it again?”

“No, it’s fine. So far, everyone who’s been going all out has held it for about thirty seconds. This seems to either be related to your advancement as pre-stage, or it’s a rule for every tethered. I’ll write nothing in the column, but we still got the measurement, right? We can get the time measurement next time.”

Sansir nodded, clearing his throat. “14 centimeters. It may be a little off since I couldn’t get it too close.”

Grev let out a long whistle, as Esmund jumped up and down in cheer that he’d won. Ranvir had expected Esmund to be better than them, but this was absurd. He was weeks ahead of Ranvir in control, despite his own focus on the subject, and he was even further ahead in raw power.

Ranvir expected to feel the green tint of jealousy and swollen yellow pride, instead the gray trepidation cracked to reveal a glossy white excitement. It wasn’t like his usual excitement, all untamed energy and the need to do something. This was like a stone. Certain and long lived, he knew it would last quite a while before it disappeared. It may be buried beneath other emotions, but that nugget of excitement would remain.

The jealousy was there too, but not as strongly as he’d feared.

“Are you sure you want to continue?” Ranvir asked. “We can go to the administration, or the Tower and fetch a healer.”

“I’m sure. I won’t bleed out and we need as much time on this as we can get.”

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Ranvir nodded, putting it out of his mind. It was her call, after all. Turning to the group, he said, “Then we’re going to need a description of your tether. That means the shape it’s in, not what it might be, but what it’s currently doing. It curving upwards, or maybe splitting, or whatever. We also need to know how many threads are in it.”

Ranvir paused, clearing his throat. He let himself hesitate for just a second before continuing. “I have three threads. They are pretty thin, weaving together and rise upwards on a curve.” His cheeks started burning in tandem with the red embarrassment that soaked his entire being.

Grev and Sansir seemed to instinctively understand why he was embarrassed and they both looked down, tapping a finger against their chest in unison. Ranvir’s brows raised as he noted them moving in accidental rhythm, both using a finger to press against their chest. Something neither had done when being tested.

“I have ten threads. I guess they’re decently sized. It’s coming from both sides of the space, almost meeting in the middle.” Esmund said, opening his eyes from his inspection. “Five threads on either side. What does that mean?”

Ranvir had to struggle not to react. Does that mean he actually had ten threads, or just five that will unite?

Kirs blinked twice, then pulled out her notebook. “That means you’re more than likely a Piercer by talent, if your tether is a braiding type.” She cleared her throat. “Are your threads spread apart?”

Over the last twenty days, she and Ranvir had done some research into further tether exercises. There was no mention of it in any of the scholar books. Even digging through journals, reports, and books written by great masters only gave them a few ideas. What they didn’t expect to be a hit was the surprising amount of young ‘masters’, and such, many of whom died on the front lines. Skilled tethered who achieved a near level of mastery at incredibly early ages. Not all of them were actual masters. In fact, most of them were simply second stage tethered.

But they’d reached that stage at such an early period of their lives that eventual mastery was a guarantee, if they hadn’t died on the front lines. Many of the accounts report of them instinctively pulling and prodding at their tether.

After digging through nearly two hundred of such reports over the last four-hundred years worth of history, they’d found a few repeating exercises, depending on the type of tether.

“Yes.” Esmund replied.

“The finished braiding tether has five regularly spaced threads—in your case—emerging from each side of the space. As they move towards the middle, they each converge into a single rope where they braid together. After this they spread apart and terminate on the spaces between the threads on the opposite side.” Kirs said. Esmund nodded, interest clearly shining in his eyes. “That braiding point in the middle is where your power unites. The rest of your power springs forth from the braid, piercing into the world.” Esmund smiled as she spoke, then closed his eyes. Kirs looked at him for a long moment before turning to Sansir.

“Mine has five threads, all twisted together into a rope, but have started spreading apart.” He answered before she could ask.

“That sounds like a spreading tether.” Kirs muttered, flipping through a few pages in her notebook. “It should move from gathered at the beginning, then spread in the middle and gather at the end. Best suited for Wings. Imagine all your power gathering in the threads just before they spread, then let the spreading threads carry them out through the space into the world, before being gathered back down into the threads as they return to each other.”

Sansir silently emerged himself fully in tether space, creating the fictional pathways. As it was, neither he nor Es’ tethers were fully completed, but in practice, the exercise didn’t need the tethers. It was just more effective. Ranvir theorized they helped to grow the actual tether into full form while also working it out.

Grev spoke before Kirs could turn to him. “Five tethers, in the first half of a loop.”

“That’s for Body.” Ranvir said, stepping forward as he was more familiar with this passage. Grev didn’t reply, just gave him another skeptical look. “Looping tether, obviously. Imagine your tether carrying power up into the loop, through your body, then back down into tether-space.”

Ranvir had, of course, done an extensive workout with this exercise, similar to the week of manipulation and tether-stretch weeks, involving careful notation of all exercise times. It was unlike both tether-stretch and manipulation in that it wasn’t so very exhausting, closer to tether-spin in that regard. It was a lot closer to a visualization than those other exercises, though, and Ranvir greatly preferred the ‘tactile’ feel of directly manipulating his tether.

He’d still seen results, not so much in control or power output, but in subtler things like the ‘feel’ of his tether. He didn’t know if that described it properly, but he felt maybe he got a better sense of his tether, and might’ve grown some. If not for both Ayvir and Svenar saying that the tether didn’t need to be finished before advancing, Ranvir would’ve still jumped on the exercise. As it was, he preferred tether-stretch.

Surprisingly, Esmund was not the best at this exercise. He struggled with the visualization, just like Ranvir had, likely he preferred a more tactile feel to his exercises too. Thinking back, Ranvir remembered him always wanting to touch and feel everything he came near.

That had often led them to running back to his parents as he cried because he’d stuck his hand on a plant he shouldn’t. Though he rarely needed to learn a lesson twice. Sansir, on the other hand, basically needed no help.

He described it as very similar to the generator training Master Orulf had been teaching. Instead of a tether, he would imagine his power coming through as the ice he wanted to generate.

Grev did alright, needing little help, but also didn’t excel at the exercise like Sansir. After making sure they were all comfortable with their exercise, Ranvir gathered them to talk about the other two.

Tether-stretch and tether-spin. He hadn’t worked much with tether-spin outside of the one time in smoke class. He knew it tended towards the less stressing efforts, since it suffered from a sudden onset of strain. Going rapidly from barely working to over-working. He’d mostly stuck to tether-stretch since the kinds of strain he felt were similar and knew it worked.

The other issue with tether-spin was the same issue as regular tether meditation. If the tethered wasn’t very careful, time could, and would, fly by. Ranvir had never in all the times he’d practiced it, been close to guessing how long he’d been exercising.

Sometimes he was only off by a dozen minutes, but more times than not, he was off by an hour or more. The exercise was excellent for endurance, he suspected, with how long he could maintain it, but without careful oversight you would over-express yourself into the ground and need someone to drag your limp body home.

As he finished his explanation, Ranvir saw them sit with the information, letting it digest. “We’ll meet here again, during after study. For the last half hour, we’re going to be working on these exercises.”