Sophia giggled. She hated the way she sounded when she giggled, but she couldn’t help it. The image of the brightly-colored chinchilla holding a pen in his mouth so that he could write a letter in invisible ink was far too amusing.

  She was certain that manifesting a pen wasn’t what the Ability would do, but that didn’t chase the image that flashed through her mind.

  “Larryt, what category is your Mistform in? Unaffiliated?” Dav sounded serious, rather than amused.

  “I, yes, but …invisible ink?” Larryt sounded confused.

  Sophia’s giggles morphed into a frown. Things weren’t adding up. Larryt seemed to be convinced that the only Ability that could be learned from that pillar was Mistform, but Taika learned something else and Sophia was pretty sure that it was only part of a larger spellform. At the same time, Sophia couldn’t see the spellform when Larryt used the Mistform Ability he’d supposedly learned from the pillar.

  In some ways, it made sense that they might not learn the same spell. In order to make the spellform work at all, you ‘d have to connect the dangling threads to something, and if you connected them differently it could significantly change the final spell. That didn’t explain why it would be predictable for the Cloud Clan, though; that ought to happen whenever people learned Abilities.

  Unless … could the Guide be awarding the Abilities based on some criteria other than successfully finishing the spellform? That could explain a lot. For one thing, Sophia was pretty sure that Taiks hadn’t completed the spellform. All he did was copy the pillar using his illusions. That wasn’t enough to cast a spell, but it was apparently enough for the Guide to award an Ability.

  And in that case, the Ability you were given as a Feat wasn’t solely based on the example you used; how you went about learning it was also important. That would explain why the Cloud Clan all learned the same Ability; they all approached learning it the same way because they were all taught how to do it. It also explained some of what Amy said about the Whispering Woods Challenge, where the Ability gained was similar but not always the same. They probably approached it differently. That seemed especially likely if people knew more than one prerequisite could lead to related but distinct Abilities.

  She really did need to talk to Amy about why Challenges here were used to learn Abilities while they weren’t used that way elsewhere. If nothing else, it should have come up while they were looking at possible options at the Registry. Was there a way to learn the Martial Abilities and Spells for her Spellblade Hallow that didn’t require Cliff Collecting them from a monster? Maybe even upgradeable ones?

  “Taika?” Dav turned to face the indignant-looking rodent. “How about you? What category is Invisible Ink in?”

  “Category?” Taika shook himself, then sneezed softly. Sophia thought it was intended to be a snort, but it was far too adorable for that. He sounded positively indignant as he continued. It was tremendously cute. “Species. I have no Unaffiliated abilities and a lot of Species Abilities, but no-o, this is another Species Ability. I can’t even use it!”

  Sophia tilted her head to the side. “Wait, when did you start being able to see your Abilities?” The last she remembered, all he could see was that he was a Comfort Animal. He had no control over his Status at all.

  Taika perked up immediately. He leaned back on his rear legs and somehow looked almost impossibly pleased with himself. “A few days ago. Nights, really.”

  Sophia waited for Taika to elaborate, but he didn’t. “It just suddenly started working?”

  “He probably had to complete his Vocation-granting Feat,” Amy offered before Taika could answer. “I’ve heard that sometimes that can happen, you can see your Status but not do anything with it until you have the Feat.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Taika agreed. There was a note in his voice that made Sophia think there was more to it, but he clearly didn’t want to talk about it. He probably just didn’t want to talk about what he’d had to do to complete the Feat. If he were more normal, Sophia was certain that their experience inside the corpsevine Leveled Challenge would have completed the Feat and let Taika choose a Vocation. Whatever he had to do, it didn’t seem important compared to his achievement here.

  “So what does Invisible Ink do?” Sophia was pretty sure that it would be a clue as to what that piece of the spell would be if she managed to actually cast the entire three-part spell.

  Taika wrinkled his nose. “It’s another color for my illusions. I’m not sure how invisible can be a color, but that’s what it says. It also says that it’s very difficult and draining to use. If it really is invisible, I can think of so many ways to use it.”

  He didn’t seem nearly as enthused as Sophia thought he should be. The Ability sounded amazing. Right now, Taika could hide people only by creating an illusion that covered them. To some extent, he could create a false background, but because he did it with light that background might not change correctly.

  If his illusion could be “invisible,” maybe he’d be able to hide a lot more things, whether that was people or traps or simply part of the terrain he didn’t want enemies to see. It was hard to make it look like a bridge was out if looking at it from the side meant that you saw the river where the far bank should be, for example. Making the bridge invisible should fix that.

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  Sophia could also think of applications for other purposes; there were so many times where you wanted to see inside something or someone. Her first thought was for healing; healers had to learn how to see inside their patients if they wanted to do well, but she was certain that being able to see a certain depth would help for a whole range of things that people usually used technology for. Technology was certainly a better answer for something that could work on everyone than an Ability that was difficult to get and required an illusionary talent to begin with, but technological solutions weren’t really available here.

  What might be even more important, though, was that Taika might be able to look for secret compartments or hidden passageways or even traps with it. She hadn’t seen any of note in the Broken Lands, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist; it just meant that they’d spent their entire time so far in places where their opponents were not very smart.

  The reason Taika wasn’t happy might be as simple as the fact that while he now had the Ability, he didn’t have a slot for it so he couldn’t actually use it. Sophia was pretty sure she’d be upset if she had an awesome Ability locked away because she didn’t have the Wisps to buy a slot for it.

  She might be about to have that problem, now that she thought about it. If the spell in the three pillars was useful and the Guide gave it to her as a spell, she’d only be able to use it as a spellform and not as an Ability until she had the Wisps to buy another spell slot. That didn’t seem that bad right now, but she also didn’t know what the spell was yet.

  “Sophia? What do you think?” Dav set a hand on her shoulder as he asked the question.

  Sophia shook her head and frowned. She’d clearly missed something. “About what? Sorry, I was woolgathering.”

  Dav smiled gently. Sophia was pretty sure he’d already known she wasn’t paying attention. “Taika wants to try to duplicate the other pillars as well. He thinks it’ll go faster, but we have already spent quite a bit of time in this area. Larryt thinks it’s pointless, since the two Abilities overlap.”

  Sophia noticed that Dav didn’t give either his opinion or Amy’s. She grinned at his clever misdirection. It wasn’t like he needed to say what his opinion was; he clearly wanted to stay. That was obvious by the way he put the question. The only real question was how Amy felt; he could be trying to convince Amy or he could be trying to present a united front to Larryt. It was hard to know.

  Well, she probably could have known if she’d been paying attention. That happened sometimes.

  Either way, Sophia’s answer was going to be the same. “I think he should go for it.” She turned towards Taika. “Try the Cloud pillar on its own, then try building all three of them. I’m pretty sure that’s how this is actually intended to be done. I’m going to copy down the spellforms on the other two pillars, then see if I can put them together and cast the spell. We might as well both work at the same time.”

  “Spellform?” Dav sounded surprised. “That’s what this is? It doesn’t look much like the ones in your books.”

  “It’s a different style,” Sophia admitted, “And I’m not sure what’s up with the fact that it’s made as three pillars; I’m used to trying sheets or packets together. I want to take it apart and figure out why it’s made the way it is, but we’ve only got an hour or so to spend here. Probably less, now. That’s not anywhere near enough time to really figure out the spell. I’m going to have to cast it based on the example, then take it apart later.”

  Sophia glanced at Amy, curious to see what her reaction was. She had her hands on her hips and was grinning at Larryt. That was enough to make Sophia wonder exactly what happened while she wasn’t paying attention and not anywhere near enough to make her actually ask.

  Especially not when she had a spell to learn.

  Instead of opening that can of worms, Sophia made her way to the second pillar. She had to carefully avoid Taika and Taika’s illusion, but now that she’d figured out the way the glyphs were written, it was simple enough to copy them down.

  The third set of runes was even easier, since Taika wasn’t there yet. She managed to finish the sketch and was working on making sure she had all of the connections right when Taika grumbled something about shadows and made his way to the third pillar. She could ask what that was about later.

  Once she was pretty sure she had the spell right, Sophia rechecked all three pillars against her updated sketch and caught a handful of small mistakes. They were small, but creating the spellform essentially blind wasn’t going to be easy. She’d certainly make more mistakes.

  Sophia walked away from everyone. She stopped when she felt spirits of the dead at the edge of her aura; they meant she’d gone as far as she could. It was always better to practice new magic in a place that could handle it if something went wrong. Something would. It might not be on the first casting, while you were going really slow and triple checking everything, but it would happen eventually.

  Sophia kept her eyes on her drawing as she built the spell. It was difficult, but she’d drawn spellforms based on diagrams before. It was easier in some ways than copying someone else’s spell and in other ways harder. You knew exactly what the shapes were supposed to be, but not how the other person managed to get there.

  She finished the Mist in the Sun pillar first. When she did, one of the reasons the spell was split into three separate major structures was immediately obvious: it supported itself and the amount of attention she had to devote to keeping it going dropped to almost nothing. It was almost like the pillar was an individual component of the spell instead of a major fraction of it.

  The same thing happened with the Shadowed Clouds pillar, but this time Sophia expected it. She took a moment to stretch her stiff shoulders before she continued. The next thing she tried was connecting the two pillars she had.

  It didn’t go well. The connections between the two pillars tried to pull them together and the formerly stable spell pieces started to try to twist out of place. Sophia snapped the connections and soothed the manaflows. It took longer than she liked, but the spellform was once more stable. She’d clearly have to build the third pillar, then quickly and evenly connect all three.

  Once the Spirit Veil pillar was complete, Sophia had to race to complete the spell before the connections pulled the pillars out of alignment and wrecked it. She managed it, but it was closer than she liked.

  Something shifted in the air around her. She knew she should figure out what the spell did, but she was too busy staring at the slightly see-through fox floating about five feet in front of her face watching her.

  I’d be surprised too.