That misbegotten arrogant buffoon just had to have the last word!

I seethed quietly after Renaris left — for all I knew, he could still have been spying on me through the figurine. It sat on the ground, gray wisps of smoke rising from the small crystal — a robin, once again.

Despite his misgivings, I had no doubt Renaris was truly one of the gods, old or otherwise. His attitude spoke for itself — he was either very powerful, or very foolish, and someone foolish wouldn’t have the ability to create such a link between worlds.

But that didn’t mean I trusted him. He had his own agenda, and even if I got my answers from the dragons — and they were satisfactory — it didn’t mean he wasn’t manipulating me. Leading me by the nose. My ire spiked as I remembered how self-assured he’d been.

I broke the circle and raised my foot to stomp the damned thing, but stopped at the last moment. The little robin wasn’t mine to destroy. Instead, I bent down and pocketed it, then left to find its owner.

Sarah was still on the deck when I found her, and she shot me a bewildered look as I approached her, still fuming.

She blinked a few times. “Uh, did you get what you wanted?”

I stopped to compose myself, then nodded. “Yes. It looks like your dreams will come true sooner rather than later. We’ll be petitioning the dragons for information.”

Sarah’s eyes went wide, and she bounced on her feet. “Dragons! Woo!” She clapped her hands excitedly.

My anger mellowed a bit at her display. “I understand that you are happy about this, but do keep in mind that dragons are haughty, arrogant creatures. And they have the power to back their attitudes up. You can’t afford to be as careless as you’ve been in the Floating City.”

She ceased her bouncing and gave me a serious look. “Got it. I’ll, uh, probably keep my mouth shut when we’re there. I don’t trust myself not to squee. But, uh…”

“Yes?”

She looked away. “Well, do you think you can handle yourself? You’re not exactly a paragon of composure, you know.”

I sighed. “I’m aware. But I believe it’ll be alright. I’ve had practice.” After all, I hadn’t lost my wits while talking with Renaris. Dragons were bad, but I doubted they could come close to an actual god — and I had a few stats I hadn’t allocated yet. Perhaps more Intelligence or Willpower would help?

I reached into my pocket, removed the robin figurine, and offered it to Sarah. It was still warm to the touch.

“Oh hey, it’s a bird again. That’s pretty neat — though, I did like the dragon.”

“Maybe if you concentrate hard enough, you may be able to make it switch back and forth?” I suggested.

She looked up. “Do you think so?”

I shrugged. “It’s a distinct possibility.” Though not a great one. But she had mentioned wanting to try and learn magic, and setting a student on this kind of task was the usual way to get them to open their conduits. “I’ll be borrowing your bear, by the way. I’m very curious how he ended up disobeying orders.”

Sarah’s eyes went wide. “Wait, you didn’t summon him to the plaza?”

I shook my head. “It appeared he arrived there of his own will, as strange as that is.” I avoided mentioning how he hadn’t responded to my commands at all. “I’ll be diving into his mind to understand what exactly happened.”

She hesitated. “You’re not going to hurt him, right?”

“I don’t intend to, no. Unless he’s been corrupted into something truly dangerous.”

Sarah opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. She paused for a few moments, thinking, then made up her mind. “I… there’s a connection, now, I think. Between me and Winnie. I can feel where he is,” she said as she pointed below and to the left. “He’s pacing back and forth. I think… he’s worried.”

My eyes widened. “Are you sure it’s the bear?”

She nodded. “I felt him when he entered the square — and when he got hit. We’re — bonded, I think. For lack of a better word.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, then. Don’t worry. I’ll do my best to keep him alive.” I turned to leave, but Sarah stepped forwards and touched my arm.

“Can I come with?”

“To the bear?”

“Yeah. Just to hold his paw, and… be there, I guess.”

I began to protest, not wanting to complicate my study any more, but perhaps this was for the better. If she and the bear were truly linked, having them close together could be helpful. “Very well. Let us go, then.”

~*~

We were joined on the way to the hold by Cameron, who promptly decided he also wanted to assist — and as my informal apprentice, there was no reason for me to deny him this.

The three of us sat around Winnie, whom I’d asked to lay on the side. Asked, and not ordered through my link, as he remained disinclined to obey — yet he’d followed Sarah to the floor with no protests, where she proceeded to scratch his head.

Cameron sat to my right, holding a pen and a few sheafs of parchment on his lap, ready to take notes. For his benefit, I decided to explain what I was doing out loud.

“First, we’re going to be looking at an existing spell. I know Soul isn’t something you’ve practiced much, but I believe I tasked you with learning Soul Vision nonetheless. Activate it now.”

He squinted for a few seconds, and through my own magic-enhanced sight, I saw the spell take shape before his eyes. Satisfied, I continued as I pointed towards the bear’s head. “You can see the spell I’m about to dissect right here. Right now, it should appear as a fairly amorphous blob, yes?”

“Right.”

“If you concentrate on it, you’ll be able to magnify each part of the spell so you can see each individual component.”

“Oh, like zoom?” Sarah asked, pausing from her scratching session.

“Huh… yeah, it’s exactly like a zoom,” Cameron said.

“It’s good that you got the hang of it, but please remain quiet.” I summoned an absolutely tiny mote of Soul. It did nothing, but released a bright yet very small pinprick of light in my vision — then I filtered it out, stopping the light from distracting me. “Follow that light with your eyes. It will show you where exactly I’m looking.

“So, what we have here is a Mind-construct, originally made by myself,” I said as I took in the mass of purple threads. “Near the center, you can see a small number of blue threads intertwined with the purple ones — they connect the Soul to the Mind.”

“So, purple is Mind and blue is Soul,” Cameron summarized as he wrote down his observations. “And the green?”

“Green threads are Fate. The ones on the left are a Truestrike enhancement. You can see them along the Wight’s combat protocols. As for the rest of them — well, that is the odd part. They were not supposed to be here.”

It was, in fact, quite baffling. Random Aspects did not simply appear inside random spells.

Cameron looked up from his paper, staring at Winnie’s head with interest. “Is that normal?”

“Not at all. I’m trying to remember when he could have interacted with Fate magic of this magnitude, or how it got inside him, but…”

“Maybe when the Archmage lady struck him with that spear?” Sarah asked.

“Highly unlikely. This work is… older — yet, not much older. It seems to have been caused about…” I squinted, trying to feel at the threads, to taste their age. “A week ago? Less than a month, certainly, but older than a few days.”

“The Circle,” Cameron said assuredly. “It was just sailing before and after that, so it has to be the Circle.”

I hummed. “It does seem like it. Perhaps the broken enhancement wasn’t quite as broken as I had thought.” I had been quite taken with the dungeon core, but perhaps I should have given the Circle itself a second look.

“I think… when he charged the tree? That had been really strange…” Sarah trailed off.

“A gigantic tree that spawned on top of a dungeon core in the center of one of the greatest Fate formations in the world,” Cameron summed up, “yeah, that sounds like a jackpot.”

“It would have lashed at him with Fate, which remained inside him and fused with the existing constructs,” I finished, happy to have a believable hypothesis. “I’ll assume it’s true and leave that to the side for now. I’m more curious how the Fate mana affected the constructs. If you look closely here, you can see it’s not simply hanging about, useless. It has merged with the Mind structures around it.

“See this? The style of the weave is nothing like mine. It’s spontaneous, and wild, and— what even is this supposed to do? Oh, how interesting.” I leaned in closer, pressing my face against the bear’s head. “Oh, how truly amazing this is.”

“What?” Sarah asked, alarmed.

“Umm…” Cameron echoed her sentiments.

Excited, I began explaining. “Do you know what makes a Wight’s mind different than a human mind? Or even just a normal animal’s?” I didn’t wait for any answers. “It’s easier to count the similarities, to be perfectly honest. Minds are a kind of construct that respond to the information you feed them. For a very simple animal’s mind, you give it warmth, and it will know it’s safe from the cold. You give it a lot of warmth, and it will recoil away, to avoid being burnt. Information, and a result.”

“Input and output?” Cameron asked?

“Exactly! A good way to put it. For both Wights and living creatures, each mind will create outputs to match a multitude of inputs. The difference is that for a Wight, I have mapped out a multitude of inputs to their respective outputs — one by one, for a plethora of tasks I can give them. From the most basic things, such as how to move their feet, to a vague understanding of spoken language. But they don’t make any more connections on their own. They don’t learn. They are—”

“Machines.” Cameron finished, agape.

“Exactly. A mechanism, like a clock. Animals, and people especially, they learn. They’re born knowing things, such as how to breathe, or how to keep their heart beating, or a plethora of other minutiae of living bodies, but beyond that, they have to learn. But the way they learn is very complicated. I have tried dissecting even simple minds — insects, for example, and even they have a mind orders of magnitude more complex than the most advanced of Wights — that’s why I can keep so many of them alive. Their tiny minds require a tiny soul, and by extension the barest hint of mana.

“But I digress. In an insect, much of their mind revolves around controlling the body. But because of the way they’ve evolved, separating the learning processes from those relating to the body is a fool’s errand. There’s simply too much of it, and it’s tangled worse than yarn thrown in a bag full of rabid cats.”

Sarah choked, then broke into a laugh. I ignored her, pressing on. “But what we have here — what the Fate mana has done — is exactly that kind of natural learning process that’s been eluding me for decades. Fate mana. To think it had been so simple…”

“Is is that simple, though?” Cameron asked, and I looked at him with a frown. “Maybe it’s a fluke. Can you do it again?”

“Perhaps…” I zoned in on the propagation routine and frowned. It had been pierced by whatever magic inserted the Fate threads, the merger of the two creating something new. Something whose purpose I couldn’t tell at a glance. And yet, from that same area, a thread of Soul extended outwards — and I followed it straight to Sarah. So the propagation module mutated into their bond? Interesting. “I can’t extend it to the others through the usual mechanism — it’s completely gone. But as long as I can continue studying Winnie, I believe I might be able to replicate the effect on another Wight.”

My eyes glinted as they flew to the stack of Wights that had been packed tightly together. “It’s a long way to the dragons’ domain, and I have plenty of test subjects, after all.”