Caen worked through the night, practicing various modifiers on his Blood-healing spells. He was especially pleased with how effective one of Healer naMoon's bone-mending techniques proved to be. The hours he spent on healing his assailants would not count toward the tokens he earned at the healing tents, but he was more than satisfied to get in all this practice.

  After retrieving it from his Grimoire, he—still with a boosted Blood-healing affinity—successfully cast a sleep abeyance spell to delay his need for rest and keep himself awake. That was sure to exacerbate his hunger.

  Caen took a break to rinse out the bucket he’d mixed acid in and wash down the cart he'd borrowed from the kitchen. He then spent several meal tokens on food, which he promptly wolfed down at the healing tents.

  By dawn, there were more healers in the tent, and patients began to stream in not too long after.

  Caen spent some time on triage to let his will recover, sorting patients by order of priority, after which he attended to burns and wounds. He occasionally resorted to mundane healing, suturing wounds, and applying salve.

  With a boosted affinity, he also cleansed spirits at the Spirit-healing section and helped mend a few spiritual tears.

  An auxiliary came to tell him that room needed to be made for more serious patients, so Caen moved four of his least injured assailants to the ground. He came by to check on their remaining wounds at various times throughout the day. Before noon, he had healed them as much as he was going to. The Body-enhancer was still blue-skinned, and while Caen had an expensive reagent that could get rid of the coloring, he was not inclined to waste it on the man. It would wear off by itself in a week or so anyway. Those of them with not-too-serious injuries all but scrambled out of the tent once they were able to. Caen couldn't blame them.

  He Mimicked so many different healers throughout the day. Blood-healing and Spirit-healing for hours on end. He practiced mundane healing whenever he wanted to recover some of his expended mana or rest both his spirit and mind. By evening, Caen was already starting to get a much better feel for Spirit-healing and Blood-healing thread clusters. The elements of each affinity cluster stood out to him far more distinctly than they had the day before. He took quick notes during short lulls in activity, and during one of these, he'd cast the sleep abeyance spell again.

  He rounded out the night with more spirit cleansing. There was never a shortage of people who needed help with that; all the more so in a place like this. He was dangerously toeing the edge of will fatigue, though a simulation of Untor's Boulder revealed that he still had quite some leeway.

  * * *

  “Wait, you did what?” Zeris asked around a mouthful of bread, then she scoffed. “You're lying.”

  He'd skipped over this part when giving her the rundown, but had circled back to it because he needed to try something out.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “I Impassioned his fire. And I think that I might be able to do it for you, too.”

  “How are you sure this guy wasn't an Aialda, hmm? Maybe he tried to Impassion his own fire at the end and bungled it somehow.”

  “I couldn't very well have asked him that,” Caen said. He paused to swallow the beans in his mouth. “It would have ruined my intimidation tactic. Also, I have a high degree of certainty that I personally Impassioned his fire. But if he was Aialda all along, and his desire to use Passionfire somehow coincided with my own desire to Impassion his fire, then that would be a very phenomenal coincidence that would hardly change anything since you're an Aialda yourself.”

  “Point taken,” Zeris conceded. “I want to try it now.”

  A few minutes later, they were at the workout field on which spars took place.

  Because Caen was worried about it collapsing like it had last night, Zeris conjured a very tiny ball of fire above her palm. Caen connected to her.

  “So you said you could tell that this guy wanted to harm you, right? I think I have that part down. What next?”

  Caen laughed. “Be serious. I think it's because he wanted something that had to do with me. And I also wanted something that had to do with him. There was a convergence.

  “I was a… a lit candle sharing my flame with an unlit one. Something like that.”

  “Oh, so like the vision from Fermien. I see. Alright. I want you to Impassion this fireball in my hand.” She raised the fireball a few inches off her palm using a modifier.

  Caen began Mimicking her Fire affinity, and her soul structure seemed more alive than it ever had. A firm impression of ‘smokeless flame’ flowed from their connection.

  Why hadn't this happened before? Up till now, neither he nor Zeris had tried to affect each other's spells. He'd Mimicked her affinity several times, yes, but never with the intent to use it on her. The Fire practician yesterday had wanted to directly affect Caen with his fire, while Caen had also wanted to affect him with Passionfire. It seemed like quite a stretch, though.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The impression coming from Zeris was clearer, more distinct than the Fire practician's had been.

  She wanted her fireball to be Impassioned. She needed to taint it with Ardor. There was a willingness on both ends.

  Swirling streaks of purple, pink, and red bloomed within the orange Fireball.

  “By the Eye,” Zeris swore. “It actually worked.” She applied spin to the tiny ball of flame. “It didn't explode, though. Should we try a bigger one?”

  “Definitely. But I want to try something first.” Caen felt keenly aware of her fireball in a way he usually wasn't. He quickly finished conforming his affinity to hers, strengthening that cord linking their soul structures.

  The very next moment, a visualization was imposed on his mind. Caen flinched back in surprise. So did Zeris.

  “What did you just do? The spell construct seems quite unstable all of a sudden,” she said. “And the visualization looks a little different.”

  A profound and alien sense of what Caen could only describe as dissymmetry weighed heavily on him. The vague visualization in his mind was that of a basic fireball with everything but its final part missing. “I think—

  The visualization fuzzed out of his mind. Zeris's fireball winked out harmlessly.

  “Spell construct just collapsed,” Zeris said.

  Caen slowly lowered himself to the ground in shock. “I think we may have just shared a spell. A visualization was… forced into my mind.”

  “Wait, is that even possible?”

  He shook his head in incredulity. “I don't know if it's Mimicry, or just an Ardor thing. It might be both,” Caen said. So much about the things he’d read on Ardor had seemed absurd. Now, he was reconsidering all that absurdity. “Let's do more testing.”

  “Probably better if we stick to smaller constructs for now, then.” She conjured a tiny fireball.

  They went through the exact motion and ended up with the spell collapsing once more. Caen had been struck with that same impression of dissymmetry.

  “Okay, I felt something really odd this time,” Zeris said, sounding thoughtful. “Like an imbalance?”

  “I felt more of an unevenness,” Caen said. “A dissymmetry.”

  Zeris finally sat down on the grass across from him. “Okay, let's think about this for a moment. Imbalance and dissymmetry. You said you got the same visualization I did, right?”

  “Only the imprint,” Caen clarified. An imprint was the last portion of the visualization of a spell. It wasn't necessary for spellcasting, and many spell schemas didn't include them, but imprints helped a practician monitor their spell construct since, in reality, Attuners could neither see nor sense spell constructs. It was the visual aid that allowed casters to know whether or not their spells were stable or how many modifiers had been applied to their spell base.

  The fact that it had been imposed on his mind was very odd. Maybe their connection allowed them to share the visualization somehow. But why just the imprint?

  “How about you perform the entire visualization then?” Zeris said. “I mean, doing everything right up to the imprint? That might be the source of the imbalance.”

  “Worth a try,” Caen said.

  They tested it out. The moment he Impassioned her flame, an unstable visualization filled his mind just like it had the other two times. He began to perform the visualization right up to the spell imprint, which was now more stable in his mind.

  The impression of imbalance and unevenness persisted nonetheless.

  “Still unstable, but better,” Zeris said.

  “Spirit patterns,” they both said at the same time.

  Caen executed the requisite spirit patterns for the exact same spell Zeris had cast and instantly noticed how much easier it was, even considering his boosted affinity.

  When he cast the spell, a fireball did not materialize above his palm. Instead, the spell imprint that had been imposed on his mind stabilized fully. It felt as firm as a properly cast spell. And his will was not burdened in the slightest.

  “The strain on my will just eased up,” Zeris told him. “Construct's stable, too. Ancestors beyond. This is ridiculous.”

  It was. None of this should have been possible as far as Caen knew. Visualizations weren't performed separately from spirit patterns. They were done simultaneously. While you could delay or endlessly repeat supplementary components like gestures and incantations, this wasn't the case for the core components of a spell.

  Caen added a modifier for left spin to the spell construct, and immediately, it lost its stability. Cursing, he told her what modifier to use. She applied it, but the construct still collapsed, the fireball winking out.

  Caen facepalmed. “I'm low on sleep. Sorry. My left is not your left.”

  They were facing each other, so they needed to use opposing modifiers.

  “So we mirror our modifiers to account for our positions. Got it.”

  “Or we could just stand side by side,” Caen suggested.

  “Come on, Fire fiend, where's the challenge in that?” she laughed.

  This time, they accounted for their positions relative to each other. It was all so pitifully easy. Caen applied a modifier, then Zeris mirrored it. The construct held a moment longer but still collapsed.

  Then they synced their applications, applying the modifiers at the exact same time. The ball of fire began to spin. Zeris cackled.

  Having told her in advance, Caen stacked modifiers to make the fireball move towards him, and she stacked modifiers on her end to push in the same direction. Then they did the inverse. Soon, they were moving the fireball back and forth between each other, giggling like little children.