Chapter: 496 – Aura and Authority

Tala and Rane each immersed themselves in their various pursuits, only coming together for meals and to be together at night when the world slept.

Rane set about a project that he’d been considering for years—temporarily taking a break from his work with conveying translucence in a stone medium. He began a creature garden, creating sculptures of the various beasts he’d encountered, starting with the arcanous ones.

They added on a chunk of dimensionality to the sanctum for him to arrange his finished works within. The plan was to augment his work with similar ‘aura’ trickery as with the few statues that he’d made in memoriam, causing any given statue to actually give off a feeling like the beast it represented.

That was the plan, anyway. It was to be a very long running project, but Rane was undaunted.

Tala, on the other hand, dove head first into working with the Talons.

Alat was polite in not pointing out that Tala’s fervor was an obvious attempt to keep her mind off other things, and Tala managed to only spend a bit of time each day in melancholic contemplation.

Rane was obviously concerned about her, but he didn’t press the issue. Sometimes, she wished he would, but she also was self-aware enough to realize that she’d likely have resented him if he had. Regardless, so long as she was able to keep functional, he seemed willing to let her take her time.

Alat was less polite about expressing her thoughts on that. She did not think that Tala keeping herself busy to keep from addressing something with her husband was good in the long term.

Tala ignored her alternate interface for the time being. It’s working. It’s fine.

–…It’s really not, but I don’t see forcing the issue as useful.-

I’m glad that we are agreed, then.

Terry seemed to be enjoying his own oversight of the Talons. Though, Tala suspected that part of that was their honoring of him with their choice of name.

-Yeah, that tactic worked with Terry beautifully.-

I’m still not letting them call me ‘Mother.’

-And that’s clearly not necessary to secure your involvement.-

…Right.

Regardless, Terry continued to be engaged with at least the most advanced of the Talons, overseeing expeditions to engage arcanous creatures and retrieve harvests as well as training the various Clutches directly.

Truthfully, the improvement of the most advanced Clutches was likely as much due to his haranguing as Tala’s sparring sessions.

Tala’s work with the Talons was only occasionally broken up by sporadic requests for observations, various specific magical analyses, or workings of specific detection and information gathering from the area that Tala had enacted her working upon.

While her training was scheduled and organized, Terry had no such compunctions, his “lessons” occuring at almost any time of the day or night, further sharpening the sharpest Talons and keeping them on their toes.

It’s a good thing their enhancements drastically reduce the amount of sleep they require.

The committee was still in deep deliberation, both incredibly excited by the possibilities and hesitant to advance too quickly, as doing so in the past—when those same council members thought they had found solutions or fixes—had resulted in net worse outcomes.

The result was Tala and Rane actually remaining in place for longer than they had in a long time.

It was three months before Tala was cleared to enact her connection amplification on a slightly larger rent in Reality.

That irritated her because she had been hoping to use the rend-fixing work as distraction, but she understood the caution, and she had other distractions to hand.

Regardless, the time had come at last.

Tala once more piloted one of the fliers to the chosen area of damage.

Honestly, it wasn’t much larger than the area she’d worked in before, but this time there was a jagged branch in the small space beyond where she would enact her magics.

They were all curious how such branchings would affect the repair work.

Once the flying device was hovering near the area to be affected, Tala began to enact her working.

She was an hour into the amplification when Alat made the sound of a clearing throat within her mind. -Tala, I have a question for you.-

Yeah? What can I do for you, Alat?

-How are you enacting your magics on those nodes?-

Tala huffed. Come on, Alat. You know the answer very well, and that’s without you simply pulling the information from my head. There is intrinsic acceleration due to the connection between two reality nodes along the vector of any reality thread that connects them, in magnitude related to the strength of the connection. This is generally so miniscule that it is impossible to feel on a physical level—rust, even at the maximum I’ve ever amplified it to, I don’t think it’s ever been physically detectable—but on an existence level, it draws them toward one another. I amplify that connection via altering the constants involved. This is essentially identical to how I can amplify the gravitational acceleration of one object toward another.

Alat chuckled meaningfully. -Yes, Tala. I am well aware of that. I meant how are you enacting any magics at all? You don’t have aura continuity. You specifically have your bloodstars anchored to the flier so that you don’t have to use aura manipulation to hold them in place.-

Tala froze, her magic stuttering even as it flowed in through her gate, her very soul hitching at the break in her mental understanding.

Alat didn’t leave Tala in that state of mental disconnect. -Look. Your bloodstars are generating a sort of aura around themselves. It’s faint, only there in the most basic sense, but it is there.- Alat made a huffing sound. -You couldn’t contest even a mageling with the authority that you have there, but it is there.-

Then, Tala did see it, and she understood.

Alat was wrong.

The bloodstars were hers; they were her in a very real sense.

If she planted Flow in the ground and walked away, Tala would still be able to affect wherever the blade touched as she could alter Flow’s magics even at a distance, and that would exert her will there. In a very real sense, she would have authority there.

Moreover, if she called the sword to her, everything between her and the sword was under some threat of her action.

But that wasn’t her aura. It was something less… Magical.

It was something more fundamental to Existence itself.

Around the bloodstars, her ability to act was more nebulous. She could see through them, which meant that even if she had to run over and deal with what she saw in person, the very fact that she was watching meant that she could exert her influence there with greater ease than elsewhere.

That—likely due to her level of advancement—was still a thing of significance. It represented a certain amount of authority over all that she saw, even if it diminished the further from her point of view or field of vision an area was.

Alat had been wrong.

-Yeah, yeah, you don’t have to rub it in.- Despite her words, Alat was clearly as excited about what they were realizing as Tala was.

She was enacting her magics through her authority rather than her aura.

For a Mage, the two were generally considered identical, to the point that authority wasn’t even addressed, generally speaking.

Rust, Tala had only really come across it because she’d been delveng into the differences between human and arcane magics.

It would be like talking about how loud a sound was and then talking about the amplitude of the sound-waves separately. They were the same thing.

True, magic could make sound easier to hear or discern, but if it increased the volume, that was an increase in the amplitude of the waves.

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

-I think they aren’t perfectly connected? Relative volumes and all that.-

Then it’s an even better example. Our authority is acting beyond our aura. She hesitated, then laughed. That’s what we’ve been doing within Kit for years now…

Her eyes widened as she actually processed her own expressed thoughts.

Has our work within and with Kit flexed this ability for us? Has it allowed us to stretch our authority beyond our aura via our soulbonds until it was able to be effective even outside our soulbound space?

That made a lot of sense as they both thought about it, that was probably why there hadn’t been more than a miniscule progression toward Paragon. They were just realizing something that they’d been doing all along.

I need to finish this test, but when we’re done…

-Yeah.-

It took a bit more than a day of dedicated amplification for the two nodes to start moving toward one another, but once they started, they clicked together almost instantly.

Just as before, the portion of the damage right next to the forcibly rejoined nodes came together as well, unifying with a visceral click that Tala could feel within her very soul even at her rather considerable physical distance.

The natural reunification continued out and away from the artificial fix. Once again, this only happened on the ‘short’ side of the damage. This time, however, the fixing stopped at the branching in the break in Reality.

Reality seemed to heal well up to that point, leaving a ‘V’ shaped segment of damage separate from the other abrasions in the area.

That had been… unexpected.

Tala and Alat watched the area for nearly two hours, taking careful readings and observing the best that they could, but there was no further change.

Well, next step then?

-I think so, yeah.-

With an act of will—and a shift of mentality—Tala broke the working, allowing the two reality nodes to spring back apart minimally.

There was an odd… straining, and one more reality node beside those artificially drawn together pulled free, but the rest seemed to remain unified.

Impressions and data cataloged?

-Of course.-

Alright, then. Let’s get it to the council, and let me get back to training.

-Or… and hear me out here… you could talk to your husband.-