Celestine was still struggling with trying to knock down the stone markers. She is starting to lose her patience while I'm just thinking that she's getting a lot of valuable experience with wind magic. She tried creating a larger sphere of air to push, but couldn't get it going fast enough for it to not dissipate before it hit the marker, she tried going for something small and that turned out even worse. She really couldn't make anything go as fast as I did because she had no understanding of that kind of speed.

The next thing she tried surprised me. This time instead of throwing an air ball, she tried to make a spell to extend a horizontal wind column. She pulled air from around her arm and forced it forward continuously. Instead of a single release, like with the spells she has been doing, she figured out how to continuously feed the spell and extend it. By using this method she managed to knock down the first stone marker, but the spell exhausted her and she almost collapsed.

I'm starting to understand the magic process of this world better. Continuous spells are possible, but the caster has to constantly focus on the spell both mentally with the will of the spell and physically by moving the magic power through the conduit to the focus points, her fingers. Hopefully moving magic through the conduit is like a muscle and she will be able to extend the time to exhaustion with practice.

After she rested a bit to compose herself, she tried again. With one down, there were four markers to go. But the spell she kept trying just wouldn't extend to the second marker before the wind column would disperse. She didn't have a wide enough conduit to force air into the column fast enough to counteract the air expanding out throughout its length. She needed some way to keep the air in the column enough to push it forward.

She lost all energy in her legs and fell onto her knees after the last attempt. The magic was starting to take a toll on her. Her body ached from the strain of continuously focusing the magic to her arm. Warran decided to end the session for today early so she could eat and rest a bit.

After having some fruit for lunch, energy returned to her body and she went to the main hall to continue making the chess set. She was getting more proficient with bone carving at every successful piece. First the second rook. Then she made the knights. For the knights she kept the basic shape of the horses, but didn't add too much detail like ears, eyes, or a mane. I stopped her because it would be difficult to explain how she knew what a horse was because she had never seen one before. They do exist in this world, she's read about them in her stories, but they aren't used in Arture. Instead they use a tall bird animal that... well let's not beat around the bush here. They look just like Chocobos. Their coloring is anywhere from black to yellow and brown. Their bodies look like large ostriches, but they have larger heads and necks. I think this is what ostriches could have looked like if they were domesticated in a similar manner to how dogs were on Earth. In lands where horses weren't suitable and camels didn't exist, something like this with large feet and a long stride would be better suited to travel through the sands of a desert. They're called desert striders.

So instead of making the knights horses, she carved them with beaks and plumage along their heads to resemble the desert striders. Quite a nice adaptation.

The next piece was a troublesome one. Bishops don't exist in this world, or if they do they aren't in Arture. There are only the acolytes in the church and the head priest, all of which wear the simple robes and no fancy hats like bishops on Earth did. In the end she just decided to make the piece just a larger pawn-shape but for the detailing she etched a spiral shape on them to symbolize the acolytes. That's basically what bishops look like, right? Larger pawns but with a little notch in their hats. She decided to add the notch to her acolyte pieces anyway just to help differentiate them more from the pawns.

For the king and queen, they started out very similarly. A ring around their neck up from the base. Then the hat on top differentiated them. She made the queen's hat rounded with small notches to give it a puffy pillowed look with a little nub in the middle. For the king, she carved a raised six-pointed star on its head. Not raised vertically like the cross on kings in traditional chess, but laid flat on the head. In the end, the king was similar to the queen, but that six pointed star made it stand out significantly. The inner edges were right near the center of the head, so it didn't look like a Star of David. It was more like what you would see if you looked at a bright light through a glass. She modeled it after the stars she remembers in paintings in the church.

After she was done rubbing them all down in the abrasive powder, she lined all the pieces up like how they would be when set up in a real game of chess. The heights were right and they looked like they were ready for battle. But they needed opponents, now.

Celestine said to me.

I said with a verbal nod.

She sighed and put the pieces into the same cloth bag as before. They made a satisfying cling when they hit each other. She gathered the bone shavings and collected them like she always did in another bag. She sat back and looked around her. The light from the windows was starting to dim. On the table was a cold plate of food Mother had given her for dinner. She really does lose track of her surroundings when she gets to work.

She quickly ate the cold dinner and went to bed for the night.

The next day, after breakfast, she was back in the backyard trying to knock down the markers. Warran even had the gall to set the one she knocked down back up!

Deciding to try another strategy, she experimented on other wind patterns she might be able to take advantage of. It's quite interesting how fast someone can learn about the physics of the natural world when they can manipulate them at will. Instead of pushing air to the markers, she tried sucking the air to her instead. This had a similar problem as before where instead of the air dissipating, the air would come into the extended channel she made at a slower rate the further out it was until it got to right in front of her and it radiated out and around her. This made the first marker fall forward this time, but the next marker only wiggled.

She was tempted to try to use wind magic to throw a projectile at the markers, but that kind of defeated the purpose of the assignment.

Then a new thought occurred to her. Could she change the temperature of the air? She knew that there were crystals in the mansion that made the air inside cooler than the air outside and anything possible with the crystals should be possible to do with magic spells, from what Warran told her. She experimented by trying once and succeeding in making a ball of cool air. Instead of casting it to remain, though, she let it go and put her hand in it. Wind rushed out of the cool air ball and into the hot air around her, and her cool ball of air returned to average desert temperatures. She tried the same thing again, but this time with hot air. When she released the spell, air rushed into the hot ball of air instead of outward, cooling the hot ball of air. The change is very minuscule, but she was able to pick up on it. This is when she learned that temperature differences seemed to cause air fluctuations. She also noticed that the hot ball tended to rise up when she released it and the cool ball of air floated down.

Her next experiment surprised me, but she did it without even thinking. She diverted her conduit evenly, let the power flow to both her hands, and created one ball of hot air in her right hand and a ball of cool air in her left. She held the two close together and closed her eyes to try to feel the power fluctuations between the two and how she needed to change her spells to maintain the two air balls. The cooler ball of air was fighting against the hot air. Cool air wanted to be underneath the hot air and vice versa. It's neat she discovered that, but I wish she would pay attention to what she just did. She just casted two spells at once!

Her mind wandered with this new knowledge and she started to think about other phenomena that happens in the air. Her mind rested on dust devils. She's seen plenty of these before, but didn't know how they worked. Air would pick up sand particles and swirl them around in a cyclone during the day and send the sand flying up into the air. Just from her previous experiment, she figured the cause could be temperature differences. So her next experiment was to create a source of hot air with her right hand and a source of cold air with her left hand again, but this time she held her left hand above her right to see what would happen now that she knows hot air wants to rise and cold air wants to sink. The spells were small enough that she wasn't getting exhausted from these little experiments and Warran didn't seem interested. The result was very simple. The hot air rose and burnt her left hand, causing her to recoil and the experiment ended.

I asked.

She was sucking on a finger that got the brunt of the hot air.

More knowledge from my last life. Hot air rising from the ground into a cold thunderstorm is how tornadoes form, not how dust devils form, but I figure they are about the same phenomenon, just smaller and less destructive.

I said bluntly.

So she spent the rest of the tutoring session trying out different spells. Mixing air currents to see what worked, using two spells to one, channel air in one direction, and two, to force air into the channel. With this she managed to knock down the first, second, and third markers, but the wind dissipated too soon to knock down the furthest two. So her magic practice ended with lunch.

After lunch she was prepared to sit in and watch Daemon and Sullivan work again when she was interrupted by a knock on the front door. Visitors were a rarity, so this made her jump. Didn't help that she was also right in front of the door on her way to the lab when the door was being knocked on.

She took a second to calm herself down and answered the door. Standing there, the familiar red-skinned snake-man greeted her with a bag over his shoulder. "Heey, missy? Miss me?" Duc'kaal said as he started moving forward. Celestine stepped out of his way so he could enter.

"Hi, Duc'kaal. Where did you go?" Celestine asked.

"Ahh," he put the bag over his shoulder on the floor and started to coil his tail in through the door. "I had to go hunting for some different bones for you, ya know? I also had to deal with some trouble at home. Nothing for you to worry about, just my nephew causing trouble again." He closed the door behind him.

Mother rounded the corner from the kitchen, probably making her way here as soon as she heard the door knock. "Welcome back, Duc'kaal. Do you plan on staying again?"

"Well that depends, Sylv. I got to check on my student's progress then I will decide if I need to drill her some more or if I can head home and rest." He pushed his bag forward, opened it up, and pulled out a bone to show it to Celestine. "That look like it will work for what you been planning?"

Celestine carefully took the bone from his hand and looked it over. It felt like a bone, was shaped like a femur, but it was almost completely black. "Is this char?"

"Nope. Had to go searching for that. There's a certain monster that roams the desert with black bones. Had a good old time trying to catch it. That's actually one of its arm bones, notice there's no extended ball at the end?"

"Ahh, I see. Wait, this is only half of a bone." Celestine said when she noticed the end sawed off, dried crimson marrow caking the center.

"Well, actually, that's a third of the bone. I got the rest in here. Think that will be enough?" He said, opening the bag for her to see inside. There were loads of bone segments, white horns, black ribs, and part of a jaw in the bag. And the bones were all massive.

"Uhm, it might be too much. Duc'kaal, couldn't we have just dyed the bone somehow?"

"Where's the fun in that? I needed the exercise anyway. Come come, let's see what you have so far." He said while picking the bag back up and moving to his spot on the couch, Celestine following him.

She picked up the bone crate that still had plenty of bones in it, along with a bag containing the shavings from her carving and the bag containing her completed chess pieces. Emptying the bag on the table, she arranged them so she could show Duc'kaal.

"Hum. The little ones are a bit plain, but I like the ones that look like towers. You even added the brick detailing. Oh, and are these little desert striders?" He picked up one of the knight pieces. "Hmm, it's not bad, not great either. Celestine, I think you can do better, but these are good enough since your deadline is coming up. Show me your process for how you made them."

Celestine was a little dejected, but she nodded at his logic. He was right, after all. Sullivan's birthday is coming soon so she was starting to rush things. She still needed to paint the board. That should be the easiest part of the whole thing.

She took one of the new black bones and started to cut it in half vertically with a saw.

"Sorry I didn't take the time to clean out the marrow. Most I could do is boil the flesh off of the outside and let it dry when I got back home."

"I wanted to know what marrow was anyway." She said, cutting through the material. It was still wet on the inside and bloodied the saw she was using. When she cut through the bone completely, she separated them to look inside. The smell was not pleasant, but not quite rancid either.

"I use a simple spoon to carve out the marrow. Sylv, do you have a bowl we can put the marrow in?"

"Yes, I'll be right back." Mother said before heading to the kitchen. She returned with a metal pail. When Mother sat it down on the table, Celestine went to work scooping out the marrow from the oddly colored bone.

"Even better. Here, I'll help clean out the bones myself." He said, picking up another bone from his bag and a saw. He worked much faster than Celestine could. Sawing in half quickly and ripping out the marrow with a metal spoon.

"By the way, what is that powder you gave me to rub down the bone after carving it?" Celestine asked, picking out smaller pieces of flesh still sticking to the bone and tossing them in the bucket.

"Oh that? It's just some special stone grounded down into the powder. I forget what it's called but it's really handy isn't it? The finer you can grind it down the smoother the polish is."

Celestine got the bone as clean as she could and started to section it up by comparing it with one of the white pawns. Then she cut the bone to size, then cut it in half again vertically. She started to file the quarter down to size and then continued her work like normal while Duc'kaal watched from her right. She did miss having an audience while she worked.

He didn't say anything and just watched as she was lost in her own world. The bone was more difficult to work with because marks weren't easily distinguishable on the black material. I wish we had something like chalk here. I wonder if there even is chalk in this world. It's something you never really think about until you start missing it.

She got through four pawns before Duc'kaal finally spoke up. "It looks like you're doing fine on your own now. That's good. Keep practicing, though. I don't want you to get rusty. If you need bones you can easily get them from the shop we met in. You got to ask the clerk, though. He likes to horde them for more practical things like crates, dishes, or cheap utensils. He depends on my tribe to bring him bones from our larger kills, though, so if he doesn't sell bones for artists, he gets on my bad side and the flow to his shop ends. Then we just keep supplying his competitors. Heh heh heh."

"Uh..huh." Celestine had no understanding of how businesses worked, or at least a very basic understanding.

He ran his fingers through her hair and patted her head. "Keep all the bones I brought. Just keep collecting the scraps and give them to a blacksmith when you have the time. The scraps and shavings can be used for cheap fuel." He slowly stood up onto his tail off the couch and moved toward the door. "I'm going to go ahead and head home. Take care, Celestine."

"Duc'kaal!"

"Huh? Ugh!"

Celestine had jumped up and ran over to him, running into his stomach and wrapped her arms around his abdomen. A thin layer of his shirt fabric separated her head from his abs. She held her face against him and her thoughts explained the reason for this. She had grown fond of the old snake man and she had missed him during his absence. It just felt too sudden for him to leave like this.

I don't blame her. Duc'kaal was perhaps the best example of a father figure she's had so far. Daemon is... Daemon. Warran is... Warran. But Duc'kaal was something else entirely. And it wasn't just that he was a different species. He has a very grounded personality and he has an air about him that exudes control. Like nothing can shake him. Just listening to how he describes the region, how the city works, and how he interacts with people tells me he found his place in the world and is bending everyone else to his will. Daemon acts like the world is out to get him and that Celestine is some ray of hope for him. Warran acts like she is a burden to him. The only other person who gives her the level of respect Duc'kaal has for her is Mother.

All this culminated into something Celestine just doesn't want to lose now. So she's hugging him like she can keep him here and is crying into his shirt.

"What's this now? It's not like we're not going to see each other ever again." He tried to pull her arms off of him, but she just gripped him tighter. He didn't want to hurt her, so he gave up and let her do what she wanted. He put a hand on her shoulder and the other on her head. The moment lasted for a bit before she finally let him go and took a step back, her face looking down trying to not show her tears.

Duc'kaal just kept standing there. "Feel better?"

Celestine nodded, but didn't look up at him.

"I'll tell you what. I'm going to be in the city again on the 50th. Some group has a little art show going on in the commercial district and I was going to go check it out. You can meet me there around noon, how's that sound?"

Celestine nodded. The sound of his tail pushing him toward the door was heard and the door opened.

"Chin up, girl!"

Celestine looked up and saw Duc'kaal by the door.

"That's better. Nothing interesting about looking at the ground all the time anyway." He said, showing his sharp teeth in a wide smile before pulling his tail through the door and exiting it fully, the soft click of the latch locking was the last sound heard.