The room was nothing like the elaborate bath house of the last trial’s end room. The walls were bereft of any decoration, the floor plain black stone, and a single table with chairs in the middle of the room was fitted with a mediocre spread of food that wouldn't have been enough if Flow wasn’t already filled to the brim with all the Issi beasts Elach had subdued.

“You hungry?” Elach asked.

“Not really.” Y’talla said, walking up to the table and grabbing a bread roll. She bit into it and spoke with her mouth full. “We’ve only been here for two hours, and I didn’t do anything to build up an appetite. This bread is terrible.”

Elach helped himself to the mediocre food, waiting for Flow to finish their business before moving on to whatever the next trial was. He’d been expecting to enjoy this; the sort of trial and training that he’d never gotten the chance to be a part of. Instead he was blazing through them without a hint of difficulty, gaining nothing from the experience except the sweat on his back and whatever Flow was making him store in Hoalt’s canister.

“Seven more floors of this. There’s got to be a better way.” Elach mused.

“Unfortunately, there isn’t.” The monotone voice said from off to the side. Elach turned to see a woman in a thick coat that went down to her knees, the hood pulled up and completely obscuring her face in a veil of shadow. Elach briefly wondered how he knew it was a woman, then thought harder and felt a scrap of Issi dancing just behind his eyes. He focused on it and scoured it clean with Y’talla’s Issi, letting it wash away in his own flow. The woman’s face was now visible, angular and bony with a pointed nose and piercing eyes.

“I assumed that your lack of barriers was due to inexperience. I see that it was because you can purge those direct attacks instead of blocking them. A waste of Issi, though I suppose everyone has their preferences.” The woman said, her expression unchanged. “The pillar’s first floors have not been touched since they were put in. They are the standard at which the rest of the pillar is compared, so changing them or adding a bypass would require massive restructuring for all of the upper floors.”

“Everyone has to go through a little annoyance so a few people don’t have to go through a lot?” Y’talla asked. “Those few people must be really powerful.”

“Yes, they are.” The woman agreed. “But you are greatly underestimating the percentage of people who enter the pillar who find these trials to be intimidating, difficult, and strenuous. To give you an example; in this current group, there are four people who didn’t receive their wisps within the year.”

Closer to three, Elach thought.

“Even among that group, you are the only one who has finished the first trial. The other three are ahead of the group, yes, but they do not have the Issi stores or skill to bypass the obstacles. They could also be rationing their Issi for future trials, hampering their speed for the sake of their safety.” The woman shrugged. “Whatever the reason may be, you are the lone practitioner who is inconvenienced instead of being tried by the trials. One person out of two hundred; half of a percent.”

The woman’s stare bored into Elach, as if trying to nail her point home. He was the exception here. And from the looks of it, she wanted him gone.

“You’re made your point. As soon as Flow’s done, we’ll get out of your hair.”

“Thank you.” The woman said exasperatedly as she turned on her heel. “You gave us entirely too much work. Be glad we’re not billing you for lost hours.”

Y’talla watched as the woman left, a frown on her face. “It’s not your fault those Issi beasts were scared of you. Any animal would be scared of death.”

Flow squelching around in the strangler ape’s chest cavity punctuated Y’talla’s sentence perfectly. “Looks like the next seven floors are going to be boring beyond belief. Let’s see how much we can get through before tomorrow.”

Floors four through nine were nothing short of a waste of time. A lot of time. Elach showed he could use his Issi’s base form; his chains, for the fourth floor. That was it. He manipulated his Issi, threw it around for a few minutes, then waited upwards of an hour for whatever deliberation the overseers were having. It would have been torture if he didn’t have Flow and Y’talla there for conversation.

Floor five was the most bizarre of them all. Elach stepped out into an empty room, then a countdown started. One hour. He waited with bated breath for something, anything, to happen, only to be utterly disappointed when a buzzer sounded and the room dissolved around him to reveal some sort of trees with weeping flowers that poured Issi out of them like waterfalls. The trial of seals, it was called. Elach pieced it together later that they were seeing if any of the practitioners would get sick from having too much Issi around them. Taking too much into their container or something. He’d had the opposite problem himself.

Six and seven were a package deal; Elach went through something like a puzzle room where all the solutions were found in Issi signatures around the room. Soak the water signature, burn the fire signature, punch the martial signature, that sort of thing. It took Elach twenty minutes to figure out what he needed to do, five minutes to solve the obvious signatures, then another fifty minutes to puzzle out what he needed to do to the fortification and growth Issi signatures. He ended up building a house of cards over the fortification symbol, throwing back his head and whooping in victory as the signature disappeared. The growth signature ended up taking most of his time, and was solved when he gave up and decided to use his time to compress his Issi. Five minutes later he opened his eyes to a completed room, a dodecagon that gave off each of the Issi signatures he’d solved sitting on a pedestal that had been raised in the center of the room.

He’d ended up having to protect that dodecahedron for the entirety of the seventh floor. Tight corridors with Issi traps that struck from all angles, Y’talla blocking the dodecahedron with her body as Elach chained them towards the end of the trial. She placed the dodecahedron on a pedestal that was the twin of the one on the sixth floor, all sides shining with their symbols for a moment before it lowered into the ground and unlocked the way forward.

The eighth floor asked Elach to compress his Issi, something he’d already shown on floor six. He’d thought that was what had solved the growth Issi signature, but the fact that there was an entire floor devoted to it brought on second guesses. Floor nine wasn’t exactly a continuation of floor eight, requiring Elach to expand his container the tiniest bit to show that he could. It really hammered home what Sentence had said; practitioners just knew these things the moment they got their bonds. He was an exception for having any trouble starting off.

Elach stepped foot onto floor ten eleven hours after he first entered the pillar. He felt like he was making good time, yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was falling behind. If Prisoner and Metea/Irric had to go through this, they wouldn’t have taken half as long as he had. Catching up to them was an impossibility, and if the invaders Hoalt was worried about were going faster than they were…

Y’talla tapped Elach on the shoulder, stirring him from his thoughts. “Something wrong?”

“You’re standing in front of a closed door.” Y’talla said plainly.

“So I am.” Elach chuckled, grabbing a ring that hung down from the mouth of a lion-like carving. “Let’s see what this last floor has to offer.”

“Congratulations!”

Confetti rained down, ribbons floating through the air encircling Elach as a bright light shone from above. He was getting pretty tired of hearing ‘congratulations’. Some sort of noise pierced the darkness around him, like a combination of a trumpet and a kazoo, and a pathway of spotlights clicked into existence; lighting a path forward to a staircase up onto a platform.

“Practitioner Elach and companions, you have cleared all the trials required to gain access to the training grounds of the pillar. Remember that the moment you venture forth to the eleventh floor, you will permanently lose access to all floors below it. If you are prepared, step up to the platform and receive your final verdict. Otherwise, you will have access to this room whenever you wish to return.”

Y’talla surged forward and Elach stepped quickly to stay just behind her. She reached the final spotlight first, climbing up the four stairs to stand above an expanse of darkness. Elach patted her on the shoulder and signaled for her to step a little to her left to make room, which she did with a nod.

“You are being given the highest ranking the first set of floors is allowed to give; fledgling. It isn’t overly high in the grand scheme of things, since the band of ranks we are allowed to give is very narrow, but you’ll rise to your proper rank very soon.”

Elach felt his chest grow hot, pulling his shirt away from his skin as his pin shone with Issi and heat. It didn’t look any different now, but its Issi signature had completely changed.

“So what are the ranks you can give?” Elach asked.

“Liveling, hatchling, nestling, and fledgling. In ascending order of capability, of course.” The darkness in front of him shivered, a golden projection bubbling up from the ground below. It showed four blurry images, then shifted to focus on the one at the far left; an egg with a baby lizard’s head poking through. “A liveling is a practitioner who cannot provide for themselves on any front, yet has still managed to reach this point. We do not allow livelings to leave the first ten floors for their own safety.”

“So someone who got carried along without doing anything for themselves?” Y’talla asked quietly.

“Yes, miss, that is correct.”

“So I would be a liveling?”

“No, no. You and Elach’s other companion would be on the nestling stage; you have a natural strength that a liveling or hatchling do not.”

“Oh.” Y’talla thought for a moment, then nodded happily. “Okay!”

“And speaking of hatchlings and nestlings; a hatchling is someone who has succeeded in most of the facets of our trials, yet excelled at none of them. A nestling is a hatchling who has excelled in one or two facets.” The voice paused. “Know that when I say excelled, I mean specifically in the context of our trials. Someone excelling here does not mean they have mastered anything related to Issi, just that they have either an innate understanding or a power that exceeds their peers.”

“And fledglings?” Elach prodded. “I’m assuming that’s someone who aced all the trials?”

“Exactly. Though when you say ‘ace’, that is also in comparison to their peers. It is someone who showed promise in all aspects, not someone who cleared all the trials on their own. If I had to place you personally, I would set you as a fully grown practitioner, where we stop with all the fancy names and give you a number instead.”

“What’s the point of having those names at all, then? Just call them, like, zero to four.” Y’talla pointed out.

“That is the designation Emperor Hoalt put in place, and so it is used.” Elach heard a shrug in the voice, then a hissing under his feet. A cylindrical wall of glass popped up around him, sealing them in on the platform. “The lift will take you to the eleventh floor, where the pillar truly opens up. On behalf of all the overseers, I wish you good luck on your mission.”