Be careful who you make an enemy of. In this world, anyone might find strength while you laze in comfort. A weakling today might come back to haunt you years later.

  - Elvish Proverb

  Corinth had not been exaggerating when he asked if I would work hard. Right now, he is walking around the newer rows of trees, showing off as he carries heavy bundles with his one arm, holding casual conversation with the new workers. I grit my teeth, straining against the impossibility of the task, an impossibility that everyone eventually attempts and grows out of before they are ten years old, trying to move a rock with my mind.

  As soon as Corinth decided to accept me as a student, a temporary one given that I am only going to be home for a few more weeks, he led me down the hill and toward the newly constructed barn. He gave me a moment to appreciate the nice new equipment–it seems my father’s been on a spending spree recently–before dragging me outside to the yard behind. A large circle of dirt was clear, the fence to surround it and turn it into a real rodeo still going up.

  “Is this enough room?” he asked, motioning to the yard around us. “To give me a good idea of what your abilities are, that is.”

  I nodded and started to show off as well as I could, not that I had all that many things to display. I didn’t even bother to show him my disenchantment ability at first, it was a well-understood ability if not all that common. Corinth liked the vault ability, congratulating himself on picking out the Gold Essentia for me when he saw it.

  My dragonfire was a different thing altogether. While he hadn’t been all that impressed about the initial burst of orange I showed off to him, I caught his attention when started to mix different affixes into it, the color changing to reflect each. So far, dragonfire has been the only ability I possess that will allow me to pour essentially any kind of mana into it. All the abilities gained from my gold essentially reject my attempts to infuse them with different affixes, as does the Eyes of the Dragon. My new wings have allowed the sky affix to work with them, but that is about it. Only dragonfire accepts everything.

  My brother watched for a long time, asking me to cycle through the different affixes I had accumulated, pouring each into the fire and even mixing them. He had me throw the fire at wooden boards he pulled out of the barn, taking note of the effect each time. He had me try to mix every affix into a single bolt of dragonfire, something I found impossible to do with any kind of consistency. Two was about my limit, three if I really focused and shut out all else.

  At the end of it, my mana was dangerously low, and he allowed us to move on. I have to explain my next two abilities as Eyes of the Dragon and Emperor’s Prerogative aren’t exactly things that I can show off all that well. Again, he stopped me.

  “So, I am guessing that you are using your artificial eye to translate your abilities through. Most people can’t do that, you know.”

  I paused. I knew that, it was one of the first things I figured out after having woken up with Galea showing me a window of my various attributes, but I had genuinely forgotten it somewhere along the way. “Do you think the information is flawed somehow?”

  “Not at all,” he said, waving it off. “I expect the accuracy is quite advanced. No, what I mean by the comment is that I doubt everyone would understand their passive abilities quite so well as you do. Especially that last one, the one from your conflux. I figure that a lot of trial and error would be needed by someone who developed that before they understood what it was that it did. Everyone has some instinctual understanding of their essentia abilities as they come from our souls, but knowing that you are completely unrestrained in your ability to gain affixes is unique.”

  “I understand that,” I say, looking over the window once more. “Finding and gaining new affixes is what has allowed me to get to where I am now. If it weren’t for that, I don’t think I would have made it.”

  “It is good that you at least understand the value, or think that you do. What I was getting at, is that I think that ability describes your strange soul shape.”

  “You are calling me strange? My soul…strange.”

  Corinth shrugged. “Unusual. It appears different than most others I have seen. The geometry of it is well-defined, which is uncommon for anyone under rank three. Moreover, it appears complex in its construction, which is also out of the norm.”

  “I don’t know how much I like you looking at my soul,” I said.

  “Do better to hide it then.” Corinth opened his hand, fire appearing in distinct lines above his palm. The flames cut small lines through the air, and after only a moment, a representation of the concentric geometric shapes that I have studied so often appeared in front of me. He projected my very soul, the affix runes even written upon the corresponding faces.”See, odd. If I had to guess, it would be that conflux of your responsible, opening and arranging the shape of your soul to better allow you to integrate affixes. I could conjecture more, but that would do more harm than good.”

  “So, that is not how most souls look?” I ask.

  “Not at all.” The flaming wireframe of my soul moved aside, another burning image appearing in the air next to it. This one was an eight-sided shape, very reminiscent of one of the shapes close to the center of my soul.

  “This is what you might expect to find. Most incorrectly believe souls to be spherical in shape, mostly owing to how brightly they burn when they make the transition from the divine to the material realm, but that is ignorant. Most people have a few affixes innately.” As he spoke, runes appeared on the surface of the eight-sided representation of a soul. “There is room to accumulate more, but that space is finite. There is a constraint to just how many affixes one can accumulate, and there is an innate leaning that an individual soul has toward affixes, making some harder and some easier for each individual to gain.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “That is where yours differs. I have never seen a soul with as much space for affix expansion as yours. Perhaps, if you live long enough, you will be able to hunt down and find them all. That could be an interesting goal for you.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to sound interested.

  Corinth’s face fell as he looked at me. “You already knew this.”

  “Well, I had figured most of that out,” I admitted. “It only took a few times seeing the new runes appear on the surfaces of those soul-shapes whenever I gained a new affix to start putting it all together. I didn’t know that most others don’t have several shapes forming their soul like mine does. That at least was new, and a little sad.”

  He smiles at me. “You don’t know the half of it.” The two representations of souls float to the side as a third spins into existence. The fire seeping up from Corinth’s hand creates a sphere, a solid object riven with lines that run all over its surface. “This is what you might see if you looked at my soul. I only have the one side.”

  I couldn’t help but move closer, peering at the slowly rotating orb of fire. “I thought you said souls weren’t spherical.”

  “Correction,” he said. “Everyone else’s souls aren’t spherical. I was unfortunate enough to have a spherical one, which came with my only affix already emblazoned upon it.”

  “You only have one affix?” I asked. “And you’re rank five?”

  “Affixes aren’t everything, Charlene. You can make it to the heights of power with only one if you work hard enough, are lucky enough to be a magic specialist, manage to escape death over and over again when it should by all accounts have caught you years ago, and have good friends with plenty of healing magic.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Lots of luck,” he said, closing his hand, and banishing all of the floating shapes. “For you though, it would be a waste not to exploit your ability to pick up affixes like you were at the market. Keep expanding on your repertoire; pick up everything you can find even if it doesn’t seem like it will come in handy at the time. I only have ever needed to work with a single affix, so I don’t think there is much I can teach you there. Come to think of it, you will have a difficult time trying to find and teacher who can help you out in that regard, which is fine. Being self-reliant is of paramount importance for reaching the higher ranks.”

  After that, he had me continue to show off my abilities. It didn’t take long for him to stop me again, this time when he saw me pull some black sand out of my inventory to begin manipulating.

  “What is that?” he said, walking over and peering at the sphere of sand I held floating over my hand.

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted, making the ball spin and roil. “The description of my ability simply refers to it as black sand. I managed to make it after disenchanting a few natural treasures, which then became this kind of black dust that I could move around a bit. I combined the dust with gold and now it is like this.”

  “Can you make a sheet of it for me to inspect?” he asked. “It doesn’t need to be large.”

  Shrugging, I did as he asked. Corinth stood there, seeming to be lost in thought for several moments, his burning eye staring at the sheet of sand in front of him. Just as I was about to ask what he was looking at, he stepped away, shaking his head. “Did a god bless you or something? It is okay if one did, but you should let me know.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, relaxing the sheet of black sand into a ball once more. “What is wrong?”

  “I should have inspected Halford closer,” Corinth muttered to himself.

  “What, is it?”

  He collected himself, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You have good abilities too. Remember that.” He turned his eye on me, shaking his head. “I have absolutely no gods' damned idea what that is. Well, that’s not true. I know what it is, but I have never seen anything like it before.”

  I stared down at the ball floating in front of my face. “It is sand, that’s black…and heavy.”

  Corinth took another long breath. “You don’t understand, Charlene. Not that I would expect you to without having accomplished an advanced degree in magical theory and physics.”

  “Well, aren’t you going to tell me? I have been trying to figure out what this stuff is for weeks now.”

  “The explanation would be long and technical,” he said, waving me off. “It is better to just think of it as magic sand for now.”

  “So, I’m stupid,” I said, crossing my arms.

  He stared back at me for a moment, but I did not turn away. Eventually, he sighed and jumped into the explanation. “To preface, there are four fundamental forces governing the origin of all particles within the universe: mass, charge, spin, and will. This black dust you spoke of only contains properties of the last two, being nill in regard to both mass and charge, and thereby not interacting with either. The various spin states are mostly irrelevant, but its will state is interesting. The interactions of will states are what we mostly understand to be magic at its most fundamental level, but most particles that have pronounced will states also have mass as well, while what you have there does not.

  “Additionally, instead of adhering to the nucleus of the atoms that it is attracted to, the natural placement for will particles as they have a fundamental attraction to nuclear forces, that black dust is interacting with the electron shells of the gold atoms you introduced, forming secondary orbitals existing inside of the bounds of the electron orbitals. Thus, they create the black sand.”

  I squint at my brother, not wholly convinced he wasn’t just making up words. After he managed to hold a straight face for a good thirty seconds, I had to sigh and let my hands fall back down to my sides. “You win. I didn’t get any of that.”

  “You will figure it out eventually,” he said. “Think of it like this. You make dust from disenchanting items, and the dust is a magic dust, though it is actively inert, not containing any magic or weight. Then, you bonded that dust to gold, very tiny…balls of gold, which gave it weight. Because…I can’t think of a way to explain orbital bonding in a good metaphor. The little balls of black sand can snap together in certain patterns, forming shapes, and the bonds of them snapping together can be very strong. Gold was a good medium to choose actually, keep using it.”

  “So,” I said, rotating the black ball of sand into various shapes that I already felt it could easily change into, the last being the octahedral spear I used to impale some particular magical beasts. “It is magic sand, gotcha.”

  “It is so much more than that, Charlene. I’ll try to think of some ways to figure out how to show that to you, but, like I said, I have never seen particles like that black dust before. This might be another thing for you to figure out on your own.”

  I put the black sand away. “So, you can’t help me with my affixes or my new ability. What exactly can you help me with.”

  He smiled, not put off by my attitude in the least. “With what all rank two magicians need to start learning, how to control their presences to their full potentials.”

  And with that, he put me to task doing what I am now, enveloping a stone with my presence, and trying to lift it with just my will. Sweat trickles down my back, my mana is dangerously low and only dropping as the minutes pass by, a headache pounding away inside my brain. I won’t stop though, won’t give in to his smirking grin.

  “He is just jealous,” I tell myself through gritted teeth. “Jealous that Exeter gave you all the affixes in the world. Poor Corinth just has fire. Can’t make a drink cold with fire. Can’t fly with fire. Can’t…”

  The rock jiggles, just a slight movement, but I know I saw it. “Finally.”

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